From Use Case to Use Case Slices

A use case has been widely adopted for requirements specification, which can be created on a high abstraction level or a very detailed level. A use case with a very detailed level can be a lot more useful for requirements elicitation, but such a model may become too complex and difficult to understand the whole context. A use case slice is introduced in order to simplify the requirements analysis and ensure the correctness of software incremental development process (e.g., the agile development process). However, a use case is usually divided into multiple use case slices in a manual way. Some errors may occur during this manual process. In this article, the authors present an automated approach for dividing a use case into use case slices. The approach first decomposes a use case into multiple use case stories, and then these stories can be composed into different use case slices according to different requirements. These use case slices cover all the functionality of the original use case. The authors give a decomposition theory and propose the corresponding algorithm. A case study demonstrates these results.