A Practical Use Case Modeling Approach to Specify Crosscutting Concerns

Abstract

Use case diagrams together with use case specifications are commonly used to specify system requirements. To reduce imprecision, ambiguity, and incompleteness in use case specifications, an approach with template and restriction rules is often recommended to achieve better understandability of use cases and improves the quality of derived analysis models. However, when crosscutting concerns are modeled together with non-crosscutting concerns as use case models, resulting use case models often result in cluttered diagrams and redundant information in use case specifications. Therefore, the overall reusability of the use case models is usually low. To tackle this, we extend a general use case approach, named as RUCM, for modeling crosscutting concerns, along with a weaver to automatically weave aspect use case models into their corresponding base model to facilitate, e.g., automated requirements analysis. The extended approach has been evaluated with three real-world applications from communication, maritime and energy domains and aviation. We compared the modeling effort required to model three sets of crosscutting concerns from the real-world applications, when using and not using the extended RUCM approach. Results show that more than 80 % of modeling effort can be saved.