Use-cases are the bane of orthogonality

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

[Definition] Bane: a thing that ruins or spoils.

[Definition] Orthogonality: if a tool is orthogonal, it can be added, replaced, or removed, in favor of better tools, without screwing everything else up. The classic example is Unix command line tools: you have one tool for getting the contents of a disk (dd), another for filtering lines from the file (grep), another for writing those lines to a file (cat), etc. These can all be mixed and matched at will. [1]

Michael Kay wrote this extraordinary statement: [2]

 	Use-cases are the bane of orthogonality. Any system with 
	good orthogonality can do things for which it is very difficult 
	to find a use case. Design focused excessively on use-cases 
	leads to a lack of orthogonality.

Then, without focusing on use-cases, how does one approach design? Is this the right approach: Develop a few use-cases for inspiration and then work on creating simple components that can be connected to any other component?

/Roger

[1] See the answer from Lee B on this stack overflow post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1527393/what-is-orthogonality 

[2] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/201506/msg00007.html