Use cases based requirements engineering

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Use cases are black box views of a system behavior. They are expressed in a user oriented and intuitive way. As such use cases have been proved useful to capture and document external functional requirements of systems. Different software development approaches use use cases as part of requirements. However, very few work have been done on use cases formalization and automated support. The proposed research program is a continuation of an ongoing work that aims at providing an approach and tools to support use cases based requirements engineering. We focus on abstract use cases represented in a textual natural language. Results obtained so far include: - a formal definition of use cases, - a restricted natural language for use cases, - an incremental algorithm for synthesis of hierarchical state machines (statecharts) from use cases, - a methodology for use cases capture and elaboration in conjunction with a domain model. We implemented our results in an open source tool for use cases capture and validation by simulation. In the proposed research program, we plan to work on: - extension of use cases for non-fonctional and crosscutting requirements, - the application of formal languages such as the OCL, and model checking to use cases based requirements validation, - the transition from the requirements phase to the design phase through use cases refinement to scenarios, - development of approaches to effectively derive test cases from use cases, - validation and improvement of our methodology using feedback from teaching and case studies.