Enactable Descriptions of Use Cases: Teasing Out Requirements

(EDUCATOR)

This work focuses on providing enactable versions of use case descriptions, similar to enactable process models. We emphasis on textual use cases because as many researchers and developers agree that the use case diagram reveals little information about interaction issues. The UML does not provide any guidelines on the writing of use cases, or on the establishment of how use case elements interact.

 

On the other hand, process modellers have for long created business process descriptions and enacted them to prototype business processes. Whereas, most of these descriptions are made using an intermediate formal grammar, we think this is an interesting approach for capturing behavioural descriptions of any process. Our enactable use cases therefore borrow heavily from this approach.

We describe an extended use case structure, akin to Alistair Cockburn's idea of primary, secondary actor and goal. We however augment our use case elements with states to be able to access interaction issues relating the primary and secondary actors involved in performing a specific event. Thus, this approach views a primary actor as the external user responsible for triggering an event, and the secondary actor as the external user affected by happening of the event. Each of these actors have pre and post states.

We have developed a prototype tool to implement our approach. The tool is called Educator.

                                            Click here to download Educator.

we are members of the  School of Design,  Engineering and Computing at  Bournemouth University, UK