A Use Case Driven Formal Approach to Check Consistency between UI Requirement and Implementation

Use Cases describe behavioral requirements of software systems in textual form. They are interpreted for creation of analysis, design and implementation artifacts, including user interface (UI). There is a very likelihood of inconsistencies in the interpretation of the Use Cases by different members of software development team. Various research efforts have been made to associate a formal model with the Use Cases to minimize such inconsistencies. In this paper we present a Use Case editor which uses restricted form of natural language and generates a finite state machine (FSM) model of the Use Case including UI requirements. The editor views a Use Case as an ordered set of event-response pair with parameters. These parameters provide input and output requirements of UI. The semantics of a Use Case and its events are captured in terms of pre and post conditions, which are used to generate states and transition rules of FSM. Both state and transition rules of FSM are represented as typed graph. UI implementation is also modeled as typed graph. We have defined consistency criteria between UI requirement and its implementation, and have used a graph based simulator tool, GROOVE for verification of consistency. The editor generates XML files compatible with GROOVE to facilitate this consistency checking.