A system for collaborative building of use case models: Communication analysis and experiences: Experiences of use and lessons learned from the use of the SPACE-DESIGN tool in the domain of use case diagrams

Over the past few years, a great deal of work has been done in the field of collaborative software (groupware). Many fields of science have taken advantage of these developments, and Software Engineering is one such field. Within this scope, we have developed a domain independent synchronous collaborative tool that can be specialized to work with several types of diagrammatical domains. Among those domains, the diagrams used in the Unified Process can be found. In this paper we describe how we have specialized this tool to work with use case diagrams and how we have carried out an empirical study with this tool to obtain conclusions regarding several issues: the analysis of three kinds of communication among users, the relationship between types of communication and coordination among users, and the relationship between communication and the quality of the modeling work.