Recommending Alternative Scenarios Using Use Case Patterns

An alternative scenario in use case specification indicates abnormal or less frequent behaviors in a software system. It has an influence on not only customer's satisfaction but also software quality. However, alternative scenarios are frequently missed because of the author's mistake or lack of experiences. In order to tackle this issue, this paper proposes a use case pattern based approach to recommending alternative scenarios. We adopt six essential use case patterns and extend them to identify the pattern type from ordinary natural language based scenario. We propose four-step approach using the word similarity tech- nique to find out the use case patterns of the basic scenarios.