Capturing software requirements from clients often leads to error prone and vague requirements documents. To surmount this issue, requirements engineers often choose to use UML models to capture their requirements. In this paper we discuss the use of Essential Use Cases (EUCs) as an alternative, user-centric representation which was developed to ease the process of capturing and describing requirements. However, EUCs are not commonly used in practice because, to our knowledge, no suitable tool support has been developed. In addition, requirements engineers face difficulties in finding the correct "essential" requirements (abstract interactions) in a time efficient manner. In order to overcome these problems, we have developed a prototype tool for automated tracing of abstract interactions. We describe the tool and compare the performance and correctness of the results provided by it to that of manual essential use case extraction efforts by a group of requirements engineers. The results of an end user study of the tool's usefulness and ease of use are also discussed.
Consistency checking needs to be done from the earliest phase of requirements capture as requirements captured by requirement engineers are often vague, error-prone and inconsistent with users' needs. To improve such consistency checking we have applied a traceability approach with visualization capability. We have embedded this into a lightweight automated tracing tool in order to allow users to capture their requirements and generate Essential Use Case models of these requirements automatically. Our tool supports inconsistency checking between textual requirements, abstract interactions that derive from the text and Essential Use Case models. A preliminary evaluation has been conducted with target end users and the tool usefulness and ease of use are evaluated. We describe our motivation for this research, our prototype tool and results of our evaluation.
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