Does increasing formalism in the use case template help?
Saurabh Kumar Tiwari, Atul Kumar Gupta · 2014
Use case modeling can be used to specify the functional requirements of a software system. However, the semi-formal nature of the UML use case model has been argued for its limitations to effectively deal with issues like ambiguity, inconsistency and incompleteness in the specifications. In this paper, we present a comparative study of the UML use case template against a more formally specified use case template. The evaluations are made on the basis of completeness, correctness and redundancy of the class diagrams obtained while using the two templates during analysis modeling. We also present the results of the qualitative analysis highlighting some usability aspects like the applicability of the rules, the ease of generating analysis models, the ease of developing use case templates, and maintainability. The results suggested that the formalized use case template is evidently more complete, correct and less redundant compared to the UML use case template. Moreover, we observed that the more formal template provided better help to guide the documentation process and to generate the analysis models, and this indicated for the better returns against the additional efforts required to develop them.