Overview
The research agenda presented on these pages emanates from experiences and similar or related work spanning well over a decade.
Firstly, the main investigator was involved in research, design and development or RolEnact, an application for enacting business process model descriptions. The external moderator has, along with the main investigator researched and obtained a PhD on heuristics for use case writing guidelines. Some of the guidelines resulting from the thesis have been incorporated in Educator. The assistant researcher has had experience with UML diagrams, including, use cases, class diagrams and sequence diagrams. The effectiveness of use cases in describing functional requirements was called to question several times and this research has helped shape those questions into a coherent research theme. Thus, this research is both of testing out nature and also of exploratory nature. Testing out because state-based approaches have already been in use in the business process modelling community. We are modifying the nature of describing states by obviating the need to make intermediate descriptions with any other meta-language. The research is exploratory because the UML 1.5 specification (as adopted by the OMG) does not define interaction issues amongst use case elements. Moreover, the specification does not provide guidelines for writing use case descriptions. To delve into providing such support for use cases is indeed exploratory, but it is working and we hope to support the writing and validation of more coherent and meaningful use cases.