Achieving high quality of use-case-based requirements

Since their introduction, use cases (UCs) have become increasingly important for the specification of software requirements. 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 separately, 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. We base our combined approach on a defect classification for use cases. This classification enables the requirements engineer to focus the different techniques on different types of defects.