TUCCA: improving the effectiveness of use case construction and requirement analysis

Most of the delivered software products are delivered with defects usually introduce in the communications and transformations among different levels of abstraction along the software development phases. Defects remain in the artifacts even though high quality, rigorous design, inspections and testing activities are carried out during software development. Therefore, every software development activity should be systematic and rigorous and whenever possible should embody the aim of finding defects. This paper presents results of a feasibility study that was carried out aiming at evaluating TUCCA $Technique for use case model construction and construction-based requirements document analysis. TUCCA is composed of two reading techniques: AGRT - actor goal reading technique whose objective is to determine the actors of the system and their goals and UCRT - use case reading technique whose objective is to determine the use case model. These techniques support the construction of the use case model and also embody a review of the requirements document. In this paper we show that TUCCA is effective in use case construction and defect detection; we detailed the results of TUCCAS´s contribution for finding defects, comparing this technique with Checklist and PBR-User (perspective based reading - user view). The results motivate to investigate the relationship of inspection techniques embodying construction steps with the construction techniques embodying inspection steps, such as TUCCA, aiming at reducing the overall cost and increasing the effectiveness of the software development.