Guided Generation of Use-Case-Based Software Requirements

摘要

In a practical sense, rigorous procedures for generating use cases are not well defined. In addition, the relationship between functional requirements and use cases is not clearly understood or easy to quantify. In this work, a method is defined to guide the stakeholder in creating use-case-based software requirements. The method constrains the stakeholder to choose from a collection of building blocks which can be utilized to both define and compose use cases. The building blocks are parameterized requirement types, each of which represents an atomic interaction between the computer and the agent (e.g., person, device, computer, etc.) which is making use of the computer. The requirement types define which actions are to be taken in the use of the computer as well as the actions which result in response. The stakeholder builds use cases by choosing from predefined requirement types, supplying values for parameters to create a requirement instance, and describing the way that the instances are related to one another. In this paper, we detail our efforts on the guided generation of use-case-based software requirements, concentrating on the underlying theory and the prototyping and tool development efforts.