Deriving Complexity Metric based on Use Case Diagram and its validation

Abstract

Use Case based requirements analysis has attained vast acceptance in requirements engineering. Use Case Diagram represents the functional requirements of the system to be developed from user's perspective and also forms the starting point for documenting requirements using Unified Modeling Language (UML). Therefore the quality of Use Case Diagram has substantial impact on the quality of the resulting system. This paper presents a novel approach for deriving a Use Case Complexity Metric based on dependency and association relationships in the Use Case Diagram. The proposed Use Case Complexity Metric can be used to measure the complexity of the software to be developed and will be particularly useful for early software development estimations.

Empirical and Theoretical Validation of a Use Case Diagram Complexity Metric

“…In this paper we validate the complexity metrics proposed by us in [33] which is based on the dependency relations existing in Use Case Diagram.…”

“…The key objectives of this work are (1) to present the empirical validation of the metric given in [33] and investigate the relation of complexity metric and understandability of Use Case Diagram and (2) To validate the metric against the construct validity criteria given by Briand [7]. Theoretical and empirical validation done in this work shows that the investigated metric qualifies as a complexity metric and is closely related with one of the quality attributes i.e.…”

“…The relationships shown in the Use Case Diagram are not incorporated in the metrics proposed by different authors in literature. We have proposed a complexity metric computed taking into consideration the structural properties of Use Case Diagram in our earlier work [33]. This metric is defined by considering the concept of relationships that exist among the Use Cases, and also Use Case and actor association in the Use Case Diagram [33].…”

“…We have proposed a complexity metric computed taking into consideration the structural properties of Use Case Diagram in our earlier work [33]. This metric is defined by considering the concept of relationships that exist among the Use Cases, and also Use Case and actor association in the Use Case Diagram [33]. We used Kaner"s framework [23] to perform basic theoretical validation and it was observed that some association between the metric and understandability of Use Case Diagram exists.…”

“…We explain the basic concepts of Use Case Diagram in Section III. The approach used to calculate the proposed Use Case Metric [33] is explained in section IV. Validation of the proposed metric against the construct validity criteria given by Briand framework [7] is shown in section number V. Empirical validation and results are shown in section VI.…”