Cognitive Dimensions of Use Cases: Feedback from a student questionnaire.
Karl Cox · 2000
The Unified Modelling Language (UML) has become the standard object-oriented design language in software engineering. An important part of the UML is the use-case notation. This paper reports on results of feedback from a student questionnaire about the use-case diagram notation and use-case descriptions. The questions map to Green's Cognitive Dimensions in an attempt to help understand the strengths and weaknesses of use-cases from the perspective of those actually applying the notation. Feedback from the questionnaire suggests that the notation causes confusion especially concerning the use-case relationships. However, the feedback also shows that the notation is relatively easy to change when moving from diagram to description and back again. 1. Introduction The use-case notation became popular in software engineering with the publication of Ivar Jacobson's book (Jacobson et al 1992). Since then the most popular software engineering methods have added the use-case notation to their...