An Integrated Quality Assurance Approach for Use Case Based Requirements

Since their introduction, use cases (UCs) have become increasingly important for the specification of software requirements. Model driven development approaches like the Rational Unified Process base the whole software life cycle on UCs. Therefore, high quality UCs are a prerequisite for project success. Despite the high importance of their quality, UC driven approaches often lack systematic and integrated quality assurance techniques. Only ad-hoc recommendations, creation guidelines, and a few checklists for inspection are available in the literature. If at all, these techniques are developed and used seperately, so that one class of defects is addressed by several techniques and other classes are not addressed at all. In this paper, we present an integrated approach that combines UC creation guidelines, UC inspections, and simulation in a systematic way. The techniques are combined based on a classification of defects in UC development. Each technique is focused on a different set of defect classes. The integrated approach is systematically developed and thus more efficient in its application.