Grady Booch Ada and Use Cases

In June of 1979, the Ada programming language became a reality ([SIGPLAN, 1979a], [SIGPLAN, 1979b]). The U.S. Department of Defense set up Ada training classes at West Point, the Naval Post Graduate School, Georgia Institute of Technology, the National Physical Laboratory (U.K.), and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

At the Air Force Academy, the task of designing a week-long Ada training course fell to Major Dick Bolz and Captain Grady Booch…

It is the second step in Booch’s process (i.e., the development of an informal strategy) that involves what some today would call a “use case.” The “informal strategy,” as Booch originally described it, was in the form of a paragraph describing a solution to the defined problem.

Be Careful with Use Cases, Edward V Berard

I’m showing my age here, but I came across this mention of Grady Booch as an Ada instructor for the military and was honestly surprised. My knowledge of Ada is very light, pretty much just a few rants from my college roommate about dealing with it in a CS class at Georgia Tech. Indeed when I heard about Adabas a few years ago at a client job at CalSTRS I assumed it was Ada they were talking about and not a legacy mainframe database.

So Use Cases have some sort of strange link to Ada.

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