An empirical study of structural defects in industrial use-cases

Use-cases perform an important role in capturing and analys-ing software requirements in the IT industry. A number of guidelines have been proposed in the literature on how to write use-cases. Structural defects can occur when use-cases are written without following such guidelines. We develop a taxonomy of structural defects and analyse a sample of 360 industrial use-cases to understand the nature of defects in them. Our sample comes from both client-based projects and in-house projects. The results show that, compared to a sample of theoretical use-cases that follow Cockburn's guidelines, industrial use-cases on the average exhibit defects such as complex structures, lack of customer focus and missing actors. Given the shortage of analysis of real industry samples, our results make a significant contribution towards the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in industrial use-cases in terms of structural defects. The results will be useful for industry practitioners in adopting use-case modelling standards to reduce the defects as well as for software engineering researchers to explore the reasons for such differences between the theory and the practice in use-case modelling.

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