UseCaseDiff: An Algorithm for Differencing Use Case Models

Use case modeling is popular technique to elicit and model functional requirements of a software development project. Requirements are seldom stable and consistently change throughout the life cycle of a project. It is crucial to understand how and why a system´s functional requirements has reached its current state. To this end, this paper presented UseCaseDiff, an algorithm to automatically detect structural changes between subsequent versions of a use case model. The approach was applied to two subsequent versions of a use case model for a distributed biodiversity database system. The results validate the correctness of the algorithm in detecting the structural differences between the subsequent versions of the use case model.