Paper Info
Title
Integration and analysis of use cases using modular Petri nets in requirements engineering
Abstract
It is well known that requirements engineering plays a critical role in software quality. The use case approach is a requirements elicitation technique commonly used in industrial applications. Software requirements are stated as a collection of use cases, each of which is written in the user's perspective and describes a specific flow of events in the system. The use case approach offers several practical advantages in that use case requirements are relatively easy to describe, understand, and trace. Unfortunately, there are a couple of major drawbacks. Since use cases are often stated in natural languages, they lack formal syntax and semantics. Furthermore, it is difficult to analyze their global system behavior for completeness and consistency, partly because use cases describe only partial behaviors and because interactions among them are rarely represented explicitly. We propose the Constraints-based Modular Petri Nets (CMPNs) approach as an effective way to formalize the informal aspects of use cases. CMPNs, an extension of Place/Transition nets, allow the formal and incremental specification of requirements. The major contributions of the paper, in addition to the formal definitions of CMPNs, are the development of: 1) a systematic procedure to convert use cases stated in natural language to a CMPN model; and 2) a set of guidelines to find inconsistency and incompleteness in CMPNs. We demonstrate an application of our approach using use cases developed for telecommunications services
Year
DOI
Venue
1998
10.1109/32.738342
IEEE Trans. Software Eng.
Keywords
Field
DocType
telecommunications services,incremental specification,software quality,use case,use case approach,cmpns,natural language,modular petri nets,petri nets,completeness,natural languages,formal definition,consistency,partial behaviors,software requirements,use case requirement,systematic procedure,telecommunication computing,global system behavior,place/transition nets,use case requirements,systems analysis,formal definitions,informal aspects,constraints-based modular petri nets,major contribution,use cases,formal syntax,formal specification,requirements engineering,requirements elicitation technique,telecommunication services,requirements elicitation,computer aided software engineering,requirement engineering,software systems,petri net,helium,application software
Programming language,Use case,Software engineering,Use-case analysis,Computer science,Requirements engineering,Requirements analysis,Requirements elicitation,Formal specification,Requirement,Software requirements specification
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
24
12
0098-5589
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
47
1.85
16
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Woojin Jin114422.37
Sung Deok Cha238129.92
Yong Rae Kwon3103150.37