Enhancing Use Cases with Screen Designs. A Comparison of Two Approaches

This paper presents a language called ScreenSpec that can be used to quickly specify screens during the requirements elicitation phase. Experiments and case studies presented in this paper show that it is easy to learn and effective to use. ScreenSpec was successfully applied in 9 real projects. Visual representation generated from ScreenSpec can be attached to requirements specification (e.g. as adornments to use cases)

Building Benchmarks for Use Cases

This paper presents how the use-cases benchmark has been built and how it can be applied by researchers. Set of 16 industrial projects (with 524 use cases in total) has been analysed in order to obtain quantitative and qualitative profile of a typical use-case-based requirements specification. Based on the analysis, two types of referential use-case-based requirements specifications have been created, one taking only quantitative data into account and second considering qualitative data. Researchers who analyse use cases can utilise these specifications in order to validate their methods and tools before applying them to real projects. Moreover, such referential specification can be used as a benchmark and allows comparing accuracy and efficiency of tools for use-case analysis

Supporting Analogy-based Effort Estimation with the Use of Ontologies

The paper concerns effort estimation of software development projects, in particular, at the level of product delivery stages. It proposes a new approach to model project data to support expert-supervised analogy-based effort estimation. The data is modeled using Semantic Web technologies, such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Ontology Language for the Web (OWL). Moreover, in the paper, we define a method of supervised case-based reasoning. The method enables to search for similar projects’ tasks at different levels of abstraction. For instance, instead of searching for a task performed by a specific person, one could look for tasks performed by people with similar capabilities. The proposed method relies on ontology that defines the core concepts and relationships. However, it is possible to introduce new classes and relationships, without the need of altering the search mechanisms. Finally, we implemented a prototype tool that was used to preliminary validate the proposed approach. We observed that the proposed approach could potentially help experts in estimating non-trivial tasks that are often underestimated

Enhancing Use Cases with Screen Designs

Part 2: Requirements SpecificationInternational audienceThis paper presents a language called ScreenSpec that can be used to specify screens at requirements elicitation phase. ScreenSpec was successfully applied in 8 real projects. It is very effective: average time needed to specify a screen is 2 minutes, and takes an hour to become proficient in using it. Visual representation generated from ScreenSpec can be attached to requirements specification (e.g. as adornments to use cases)