Objective of UCEd

The objective of the Use Case Editor (UCEd) is to provide automatic support to requirements engineering. Requirements in UCEd approach consist of a Domain model, Use Cases, and Scenarios.

• A Domain model describes the system under consideration with the pertinent concepts in the system's operating environment. The description of each domain element includes properties, operations and relationships. A domain model is conveniently represented as a UML high level class diagram.
• A Use Case is the specification of a sequence of actions, including variants, that a system can perform, interacting with actors of the system. A use case describes a piece of behavior of a system without revealing the internal structure of the system. As such use cases are effective means for requirements elicitation and analysis, and various software development approaches including the Unified Software Development Process recommend use cases for requirements description.
• A Scenario is linear sequence of interactions between a system and actors of that system. Scenarios can be considered as instances of use cases.

UCEd takes a set of related use cases written in a restricted form of natural language and generates a State Model that integrates the behavior specified by the use cases. The generation process relies on information contained in an application domain model.

UCEd uses generated state models as prototypes for simulation. Simulation can be manual through a generated graphical user interface, or automated with scenarios.

The end objectives of UCEd are:

1. the production of validated requirements in the form of use cases, a domain model definition, and scenarios,
2. the production of requirements specifications in the form of description of operation effects in the domain model, and generated state models, and,
3. the production of re-usable test scripts in the form of scenarios.