Elaboration of use case specifications: an approach based on use case fragments

Abstract

Use case description has gained a wide acceptance among the many techniques available for information systems requirements specification. However, piecing up all the details required for the production of a high quality use case can be a daunting task, especially for students and novice requirements professionals. This paper presents an approach aiming at reducing the time required for the elaboration of high quality use case specifications. The basis of the approach is to write a use case text using the composition ofset of pre-defined fragments, where each fragment represents a recurring set of interactions required to achieve a sub-goal. Each fragment can then be customized to meet use case goals. Since each fragment is coded using the best practices for writing use case steps, both the fragment text and the final use case text will be well composed. We believe that this approach will allow novice requirements professional to write high quality use cases in less time than it would be necessary using the other approaches. Our experience on writing use cases for business information systems using a catalogue of use case fragments suggested that they can be a facilitator in several aspects, not only improving the writing speed, but also leading to standardization and concision of use case specifications. Copyright 2008 ACM.