Replicating the CREWS Use Case Authoring Guidelines Experiment

  • Authors:

  • Karl Cox;Keith Phalp

  • Affiliations:

  • Empirical Software Engineering Research Group, School of Design, Engineering & Computing, Bournemouth University, Dorset, UK;Empirical Software Engineering Research Group, School of Design, Engineering & Computing, Bournemouth University, Dorset, UK

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Use cases have become an important toolin software engineering. There has been much focus on the diagramnotation but relatively little on use-case descriptions. As partof a welcome and important research project into the use of scenariosin requirements engineering, the CREWS (Co-operative RequirementsEngineering With Scenarios, an EU funded ESPRIT project 21903)team has proposed a set of guidelines for writing use-case descriptions.This paper describes the replication of a CREWS project experimentthat suggests CREWS use-case authoring guidelines improve thecompleteness of use-case descriptions. Our results show thatthe CREWS guidelines do not necessarily improve the use-casedescriptions, only that the subjects implemented varying numbersof guidelines in their use-case descriptions. Subjects in thecontrol group implemented a significant percentage of the guidelinesby `chance.' To further justify our results, we also apply adifferent marking scheme to compare with the CREWS approach.The results from the alternative marking approach show that therewas no significant difference between the qualities of the use-casedescriptions across the various groups.