While preparing and planning software architectures, the architect can get help from the actors/actions model to discover how the system will be used by whom. The architect defines actors and how they act in the system. The actors map each incoming communication to either a message sent to other actors or a new behavior that will govern the response to the next message processed or create new actors.
Thinking and finding out how the actors will handle the incoming communication and going beyond and finding out what they need to do helps architects understand the domain and create a better architecture for it.
