A Controlled Experiment to Assess the Effectiveness of Eight Use Case Templates

Use case models, that include use case diagrams along with their documentations, are typically used to specify the functional requirements of the software systems. Use cases are usually semi-structured and documented using some natural language hence issues like ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness are inevitably introduced in the specifications. There have been many efforts to formalize the use case template that make use of certain grammatical construction to guide the structure or style of the description. This paper describes an empirical work to assess the usefulness of eight such use case templates against a set of five judging criteria, namely, completeness, consistency, understandability, redundancy and fault proneness. We conducted a controlled experiment where a group of postgraduate students applied these use case templates on multiple problem specifications. In our results, Yue's template was found to be more consistent and less fault prone, Cockburn's template was found to be more complete and more understandable and, Tiwari's template was found to be less redundant as compared to the other use case templates, though the results were not statistically significant.