Formalizing and Automating Use Case Model Development

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach that formalizes specific elements and activities of the use case modeling process in order to overcome problematic issues common to the conventional use case methods, namely the lack of systematic elicitation support in the identification of use case elements, the vagueness introduced by the use of informal natural language to define use case specifications, and the limited support of dedicated software tools that makes UCDA a timeconsuming and error-prone activity. In particular, with the use of our approach, formalization of the stage for identifying the use case elements is achieved with the use of predefined types of use cases and actors, specific guidelines to define associations, relationships and business rules, and formalized sentential patterns. Formalization and clarity of the use case specification is achieved with the use of specific types of actions and guidelines, on one hand, and natural language-based authoring rules, on the other. A dedicated software tool supports the automation of the proposed approach including the automated generation of use case diagrams and specifications. Preliminary empirical evaluation of the proposed approach indicated its effectiveness and efficiency.

The Automatic Definition of the Intuitive Linguistic Heuristics Set to Recognize the Elements of UML Analysis and Design Models in English

“…from an entered textual requirement written in the English language by Gulia et al [32], and proposed by Mohanan et al [33] to support Semantic Business Vocabulary (SBV) and rules that process textual requirement and business designs written in the English language to produce object-oriented models. Synthesizing rules based on previous examples is an approach proposed by Georgiades et al [34], for formalizing certain elements and activities of the use case modeling process. This is not an analyzing process of current text written in natural language as other approaches follow.…”

Deriving Complexity Metric based on Use Case Diagram and its validation

“…Use Case Diagram depicts the behavior of system [13]. Use case based requirements analysis illustrates interactions between users and system.…”

A systematic literature review of use case specifications research

“…Nevertheless, their inherent utilization of natural language and a behavior of requirement documentation in a semi-conventional way, mean that they are affected by issues such as ambiguity, redundancy, inconsistency, and incompleteness [2,32,146]. Several efforts have been made by researchers in order to address these issues by formalizing both behavioral and structural aspects of the use case specifications [16,57,69,141,151].…”