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For example how do we know that the customer and the mobile phone user are not 2 different people so for example a parent ordered the contract phone but her/his kids use it, so you'll have 2 actors one called mobile phone user and one called customer or it will just be one?

Kara
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PedramCarter
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    it depends whether the parent is relevant for your application, if it participates in any of your scenarios in any way. if not, then it is not part of the use case. if yes, then it is a separate role and deserves an actor. – Palo Dec 31 '14 at 19:19
  • Sup for example a call center agent can issue a customer a bill, and the agent can either disconnect or connect a phone using an external system which I created a actor called "network" but will the phone also be an actor? – PedramCarter Dec 31 '14 at 19:30
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    I can imagine phone being an actor, if it has some autonomous behavior that is not controlled by some other user in your scenario. For instance automatically monitoring the traffic and sending data to some map server. But even then, it would probably be nicer to show a software agent, not phone as such I think. – Palo Dec 31 '14 at 19:39

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You'll notice from the comments that the answer to your question depends on information that you haven't provided. It doesn't really matter whether the mobile phone user and the customer are two different people or not. What does matter is the context in which they are interacting with the system.

For example, suppose you have two different people with bank accounts. One has a checking account, and one has a savings account. You could set them up as two different actors, but it's probably better to just have one customer actor. After all, you would probably have any number of customers, and each would have either type of account or both. So, the fact that one customer might not have a savings account isn't relevant to the system. The system has savings use cases and checking use cases and customers as a group interact with both.

So, how does that apply to your situation? It depends. It seems most likely, however, that most of the people paying for the phone service are also the people using the phone. In that case, there would just be one type of actor. If on the other hand, the system had distinctly different use cases for people who paid for the service and people who used it, and those people were often different, you could draw that distinction by using two different actors.

BobRodes
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