Our Approach

We augment use case descriptions with states and provide an enactable environment to prototype the descriptions. The simple nature of the use case description is to be maintained whereby construction of the state-based description does not require the use of an intermediate grammar. We adopt a description making scheme based on Phalp and Cox's CP rules where a use case event follows the pattern : <Actor><verb>..."other parts of the event" e.g. <Customer><inserts> "ATM card in the ATM". We use short phrases for states to cut down on ambiguity or meaningless states. Our state-based approach is similar to that adopted by the process modelling community where process model descriptions are augmented with states that depict real world situations around which the models are actually executed.

The aim of this approach is to make it as easy as possible for non-computer experts (especially general system users) to take part in use case writing descriptions without technical training (especially on formal technique such as CSP or FSP).