Mitigating Difficulties In Use-Case Modeling

The specification of software requirements in an enterprise system is crucial for software quality. The use-case (UC) approach is often used to describe software requirements because, among other benefits, its simplicity and ability to convey detailed information favors communication between business analysts, requirements analysts and, crucially, end users, who can easily understand and validate requirements. However, UC models are easier to understand than to specify, and difficulties in use case modeling (UCM) may negatively affect the quality of UC models, and so its usefulness. UC models quality can be enhanced by several modeling strategies mapped in the literature. However, no studies were found to show which of these strategies can be used to mitigate specific difficulties. There is a gap between UCM difficulties and UCM strategies. This paper presents a difficulty- strategy correlation proposal based on quality attributes of the UC model. This correlation was initially evaluated in a controlled experiment with students of an undergraduate program in computer science.