User-friendly approach to engineerning UML use 
case models






engineering, user interface design, program synthesis, use 
cases, scenarios


Formal models are likely to be 
the key to accelerated development of software 
and gaining time-to-market through the use of 
modern powerful CASE tools, which promise automation 
to several phases of the developments process. 
Hoewever, there are certain barriers for adoption 
of formal modelling techniques in industry. We 
identify several such barriers, two most significant 
ones being requirements engineering barrier and ease 
of use barrier. Non-technical interfaces to engineering 
of formal requirements models need to be 
developed in order to overcome these barriers. 
In this paper we suggest a new 
user-friendly approach to engineering requirements as UML 
use cases. Our approach requires, that a 
formalized user-interface model is produced prior to 
requirements analysis phase. The essence of our 
approach is to capture requirements as scenarios 
through direct manipulation with the elements of 
the user interface. The paper provides detailed 
description of this approach and discusses how 
a user-friendly set of formal modelling tools 
can be build based on this approach. 
We describe the Use Case Studio toolkit 
which integrates the suggested approach with the 
automatic synthesis technique to produce a comprehensive 
requirement engineering environment, which can be user 
by non-technical experts. Some experiences of using 
the Use Case Studio are discussed. We 
compare our approach with related work and 
outline future research directions.