Prioritizing Use Cases: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The prioritization of software requirements is necessary for successful software development. A use case is a useful approach to represent and prioritize user-centric requirements. Use-case-based prioritization is used to rank use cases to attain a business value based on identified criteria. The research community has started engaging use case modeling for emerging technologies such as the IoT, mobile development, and big data. A systematic literature review was conducted to understand the approaches reported in the last two decades. For each of the 40 identified approaches, a review is presented with respect to consideration of scenarios, the extent of formality, and the size of requirements. Only 32.5% of the reviewed studies considered scenario-based approaches, and the majority of reported approaches were semiformally developed (53.8%). The reported result opens prospects for the development of new approaches to fill a gap regarding the inclusive of strategic goals and respective business processes that support scenario representation. This study reveals that existing approaches fail to consider necessary criteria such as risks, goals, and some quality-related requirements. The findings reported herein are useful for researchers and practitioners aiming to improve current prioritization practices using the use case approach.