A field study of the software design process for large systems
Communications of the ACM
Guiding the construction of textual use case specifications
Data & Knowledge Engineering - Special jubilee issue: DKE 25
Studying the process of software design teams
ISPW '90 Proceedings of the 5th international software process workshop on Experience with software process models
Use cases: requirements in context
Use cases: requirements in context
Applying use cases (2nd ed.): a practical guide
Applying use cases (2nd ed.): a practical guide
Writing Effective Use Cases
Quality and Understandability of Use Case Models
ECOOP '01 Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming
Guiding Use Case Authoring: Results of an Empirical Study
RE '99 Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering
Assessing the quality of use case descriptions
Software Quality Control
Improving the quality of use case descriptions: empirical assessment of writing guidelines
Software Quality Control
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Within requirements engineering, it is generally accepted that in writing specifications (or indeed any requirements phase document), one attempts to produce an artefact which will be simple to comprehend for the user. That is, whether the document is intended for customers to validate requirements, or engineers to understand what the design must deliver, comprehension is an important goal for the author. Indeed, advice on producing `readable' or `understandable' documents is often included in courses on requirements engineering. However, few researchers, particularly within the software engineering domain, have attempted either to define or to understand the nature of comprehension and its implications for guidance on the production of quality requirements. Therefore, this paper examines thoroughly the nature of textual comprehension, drawing heavily from research in discourse process, and suggests some implications for requirements (and other) software documentation. In essence, we find that the guidance on writing requirements, often prevalent within software engineering, may be based upon assumptions that are an oversimplification of the nature of comprehension. Hence, the paper examines guidelines which have been proposed, in this case for use case descriptions, and the extent to which they agree with discourse process theory, before suggesting refinements to the guidelines which attempt to utilise lessons learned from our richer understanding of the underlying discourse process theory. For example, we suggest subtly different sets of writing guidelines for the different tasks of requirements, specification and design.