Validating an Approach to Formalize Use Cases with Ontologies

TL;DR

This paper validates an ontology-based formalization approach for use cases, demonstrating its feasibility, usefulness, and user-friendliness through a structured evaluation study.

Contribution

It presents a validated approach to formalize use cases with ontologies, including an assessment of acceptance, support, and usability.

Findings

Participants found the approach feasible and useful.

The supporting tool was rated as easy to use.

The approach encourages formalization in industry contexts.

Abstract

Use case driven development methodologies put use cases at the center of the software development process. However, in order to support automated development and analysis, use cases need to be appropriately formalized. This will also help guarantee consistency between requirements specifications and the developed solutions. Formal methods tend to suffer from take up issues, as they are usually hard to accept by industry. In this context, it is relevant not only to produce languages and approaches to support formalization, but also to perform their validation. In previous works we have developed an approach to formalize use cases resorting to ontologies. In this paper we present the validation of one such approach. Through a three stage study, we evaluate the acceptance of the language and supporting tool. The first stage focusses on the acceptance of the process and language, the second on the support the tool provides to the process, and finally the third one on the tool's usability aspects. Results show test subjects found the approach feasible and useful and the tool easy to use.