Metamodel evolution is rarely driven by empirical evidences of metamodeldrawbacks. In this paper, the evolution of the use case metamodel usedby the publicly available requirements management tool REM is presented. Thisevolution has been driven by the analysis of empirical data obtained during theassessment of several metrics–based verification heuristics for use cases developedby some of the authors and previously presented in other international fora.The empirical analysis has made evident that some common defects found inuse cases developed by software engineering students were caused not only bytheir lack of experience but also by the expressive limitations imposed by the underlyinguse case metamodel used in REM. Once these limitations were clearlyidentified, a number of evolutionary changes were proposed to the REM use casemetamodel in order to increase use case quality, i.e. to avoid those situations inwhich the metamodel were the cause of defects in use case specifications.
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