Title
Semantic Differencing of Use Case Diagrams
Abstract
Use case diagrams (UCDs) are widely used for describing how different users use the functionalities of a system to achieve their goals. As today's software systems offer an ever-increasing number of functionalities, it becomes more and more difficult for software engineers to decide how the behaviors of different systems, various versions, or system variants differ from the stakeholders' points of views. Notwithstanding the importance of UCDs in addressing this challenge, previous work neglected the development of a definition of an UCD language with a precise semantics that goes beyond a high-level representation of stick figures with bubbles. Since these representations neither have a well-defined syntax nor a formal semantics, clearly distinguishing the meanings of two diagrams becomes difficult. To tackle this challenge, this paper defines a formal syntax and semantics for a UCD variant and presents a semantic differencing operator that we evaluated experimentally with a set of example diagrams.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.5381/jot.2022.21.3.a5
JOURNAL OF OBJECT TECHNOLOGY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Use Case, Use Case Diagram, Semantic Differencing, Semantics, Analysis, Evolution, Difference, Model, UML
Journal
21
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1660-1769
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Oliver Kautz142.19
Bernhard Rumpe22691313.45
Louis Wachtmeister300.34