An investigation of use case quality in a large safety-critical software development project

Use case modelling is a much-used technique for eliciting and documenting functional requirements. The quality of the use cases may have an important impact on the development project and on the resulting software product. This paper presents an empirical study of the changes that were made to the use case models in a large software project during the analysis phase. The results show (a) which were the most difficult aspects of use case modelling in this project and (b) how the quality of the functional requirements, in particular correctness, completeness, and clarity, was improved through the use case modelling process.