Capturing business transaction requirements in use case models
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing
LTS semantics for use case models
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing
Information and Software Technology
MODELS '09 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
Activity labeling in process modeling: Empirical insights and recommendations
Information Systems
Mastering use cases: capturing functional requirements for interactive applications
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems
The role of comprehension in requirements and implications for use case descriptions
Software Quality Control
On the refactoring of activity labels in business process models
Information Systems
PROFES'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement
Facilitating the transition from use case models to analysis models: Approach and experiments
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Information and Software Technology
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Use cases are the main requirements vehicle of the UML and are used widely to specify systems. Hence, the need to write clear and accurate use case descriptions has a significant impact for many practitioners. However, many have pointed to weaknesses in the support offered to those writing use cases, and a number of authors advocate the use of rules in the composition and structuring of use case descriptions. These rules constrain the user, by only allowing certain grammatical constructions, typically guiding the structure or the style of the description For example, the CREWS research project pioneered Use Case Authoring Guidelines, suggesting that the adoption of such guidelines improved resulting use case descriptions. Replication of CREWS studies appeared to confirm the view that use case descriptions were improved through the application of guideline sets, but also noted that learning such rules presented a significant overhead. Hence, a leaner set of guidelines (the CP rules) was developed.This paper describes empirical work to assess the utility of these two sets of writing guidelines (CREWS and CP). In particular, descriptions are assessed against a set of established criteria--a use case quality description checklist, which the authors described in a previous paper.Our findings suggest that the leaner set of guidelines performs at least as well in terms of their ability to produce clear and accurate (comprehensible) descriptions. Hence, that a tractable set of rules may prove applicable to the industrial context, which could lead to effective validation of use cases.