Listening to the customer's voice
Software Development
Guiding the construction of textual use case specifications
Data & Knowledge Engineering - Special jubilee issue: DKE 25
Software for use: a practical guide to the models and methods of usage-centered design
Software for use: a practical guide to the models and methods of usage-centered design
Writing Effective Use Cases
Replicating the CREWS Use Case Authoring Guidelines Experiment
Empirical Software Engineering
Lessons in Agility From Internet-Based Development
IEEE Software
Guiding Use Case Authoring: Results of an Empirical Study
RE '99 Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering
Application of Linguistic Techniques for Use Case Analysis
RE '02 Proceedings of the 10th Anniversary IEEE Joint International Conference on Requirements Engineering
Improving the use case driven approach to requirements engineering
RE '95 Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering
The Requirements/Service/Interface (RSI) Approach to Use Case Analysis
TOOLS '99 Proceedings of the Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems
Use Case Pitfalls: Top 10 Problems from Real Projects Using Use Cases
TOOLS '99 Proceedings of the Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems
A Requirements Negotiation Model Based on Multi-Criteria Analysis
RE '01 Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering
Using an expert panel to validate a requirements process improvement model
Journal of Systems and Software
Elaboration of use case specifications: an approach based on use case fragments
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Use case evaluation (UCE): a method for early usability evaluation in software development
INTERACT'07 Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction
Automated extraction of security policies from natural-language software documents
Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
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Use cases are one of the most common mechanisms for describing and analyzing software system requirements. Due to use of natural language in use case descriptions, it is often assumed that they are easy to understand for stakeholders involved in the software development process [8]. However some authors argue [17,18] that the most common pitfalls of use cases written by professionals is that the customer does not understand them. In this paper we would like to consider whether it is appropriate to take their understandability to non-technically minded stakeholders for granted.We have analyzed 88 use cases written by final-year undergraduate computer science students for an assignment at the University of Hertfordshire and point out ways in which a computing-based mindset or way of thinking infiltrates the use cases, possibly making them difficult to understand for non-technical partners and hindering or pre-empting design decisions. We suggest that the problems we observed among students indicate a need for adding a new rule and/or guideline when teaching students to write good quality use cases, which is to ensure as far as possible that their use cases are free from computing-based structures and vocabulary. We also suggest ways in which students studying technical aspects of computer science might be led into practicing the use of non-technical language.