Comparing Use Case Writing Guidelines

Use cases are a widely used technique for requirements specification as part of the Unified Modelling Language (UML). However, use cases rely predominantly upon natural language. For this reason, the CREWS research group has proposed guidelines to assist in writing use cases. Various research groups, including ourselves, have found that writing guidelines (CREWS) help. However, our experience with students is that the CREWS guidelines are a little unwieldy, and can be difficult to apply. In this paper we propose some simplified (CP) use case guidelines, particularly in terms of admissible structures. We then describe a pilot experiment to explore whether the simplifications result in any loss of use case quality. Our initial results suggest that our simpler guidelines perform at least as well as the CREWS guidelines. Consequently, we suggest that, given these promising findings, further empirical studies, particularly industrial case studies, be conducted to confirm whether our simplified approach warrants industrial adoption.