A Practical Use Case Modeling Approach to Specify Crosscutting Concerns

Use case diagrams together with use case specifications are commonly used to specify system requirements. To reduce imprecision, ambiguity, and in- completeness in use case specifications, an approach with template and re- striction rules is often recommended to achieve better understandability of use cases and improves the quality of derived analysis models. However, when cross- cutting concerns are modeled together with non-crosscutting concerns as use case models, resulting use case models often result in cluttered diagrams and redun- dant information in use case specifications. Therefore, the overall reusability of the use case models is usually low. To cope with these, we extend a general use case approach, named as RUCM, for modeling crosscutting concerns, along with a weaver to automatically weave aspect use case models into their corresponding base model to facilitate, e.g., automated requirements analysis. The extended RUCM approach has been evaluated with three industrial applications from com- munication, maritime and energy domains and aviation. We also compared the modeling effort required to model three sets of crosscutting concerns from the industrial applications, when using and not using the extended RUCM approach. Results show that more than 80% of modeling effort can be saved.