About the tool

Background

Use cases are the UML vehicles for requirements description. Use cases have gained wide spread usage due to their ease of use, and their use of natural language to describe software behaviour from the point of view of the users.

The use case diagram, which many UML proponents seem to use is not informative enough for most requirements purposes. This is because despite the diagram showing actors and corresponding use cases, it does not outline the nature of interactions amongst those elements. Describing such interaction information is crucial for requirements validation and might aid in determining static information during movement from specification to design. This is an application for authoring use case descriptions and their state-based information. The application animates the edited description to prototype described behaviour. The underlying motivation is that  when a description is animated rather than just read, users easily identify flaws in the behaviour represented by the description.

Introduction

The tool is for authoring use case descriptions and enacting them to visualize the implied behaviour and change the description if need be..

The main functions involve: registering actors, events, and pre/post conditions for those events. The tool then supports the stepping through of each written description showing state changes and actor interactions during various events. The user can also override state-driven enaction by choosing a default enaction scheme that ignores states.