Tool support for essential use cases to better capture software requirements

Abstract

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.

The socio-technical design of a library and information science collaboratory

“…This is one of the strengths of use cases, as suggested by Kamalrudin et al (2010). In our design process this came into play when we described the future scenarios of interaction as: The actor makes the data collection instrument available in the collaboratory, instead of an alternative:…”

“…That is, use cases are based on proposed future scenarios of interactions between human actors and systems. Kamalrudin et al (2010: 256) suggest that use cases facilitate 'alternative designs, such as using biometrics as an identification method, that still meet the "essential" requirements'.…”

“…To address the challenges with using narratives and natural language Kamalrudin et al (2010) are conducting research to automatically extract the essential parts of a narrative use case to form what they call essential use cases. They argue for the importance of the rich information inherent in natural language narratives, building upon the findings of Jagielska et al (2006) who showed that it is difficult to separate the design of use cases from the more traditional computing mindset and vocabulary.…”

MaramaAI: tool support for capturing and managing consistency of multi-lingual requirements

“…We demonstrate the usage of our tool in capturing the requirements and managing the consistency of multi-lingual requirements written in both English and Malay languages with an example scenario from a set of requirements for reserving a vehicle from a rental company [5]. Massila, the requirements engineer, translates the requirements to the Malay language as the client is a Malay speaker.…”

“…Figure 1 illustrates our previous English language only approach [2,3,4,5]. In our new work, extraction of EUCs from text and consistency checking (steps 1-6) has been extended with essential interaction modelling "abstract interactions" in the Malay language.…”