Comparing the Effect of Use Case Format on End User Understanding of System Requirements

Abstract

The effective analysis and specification of requirements is critical in software development. Faults in the requirements may have significant impact on the quality of the software system. Use cases describe and analyze requirements in many current Object Oriented (OO) development methodologies, and can serve as a means for developers to communicate with different stakeholders. However, issues concerning use case format and level of detail are unclear and debatable. This study uses theories from cognitive psychology on how humans understand text and diagrams to investigate the effect of use case model format on end user understanding. An experiment to assess the performance of novices when using different use case formats indicated that for tasks that required only surface understanding of the use case model, the provision of diagrams along with the textual use case descriptions significantly improved comprehension performance in both familiar and unfamiliar application domains. However, the author found no statistically significant difference in performance between simple and detailed diagrams, suggesting that the provision of simple diagrams along with textual use case descriptions might be sufficient to support the negotiation and communication on system requirements between novice end-users and system analysts.