Detecting Bad Smells in Use Case Descriptions

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated technique and tool for detecting 22 types of bad smells in use case descriptions, improving the quality and completeness of system requirements documentation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel automated detection method for poor use case descriptions, including a catalog of bad smells and an implementation with promising accuracy.

Findings

Detected 22 bad smells with high recall (0.981)

Achieved a precision ratio of 0.591 in smell detection

Enhanced quality of use case descriptions through automation

Abstract

Use case modeling is very popular to represent the functionality of the system to be developed, and it consists of two parts: use case diagram and use case description. Use case descriptions are written in structured natural language (NL), and the usage of NL can lead to poor descriptions such as ambiguous, inconsistent and/or incomplete descriptions, etc. Poor descriptions lead to missing requirements and eliciting incorrect requirements as well as less comprehensiveness of produced use case models. This paper proposes a technique to automate detecting bad smells of use case descriptions, symptoms of poor descriptions. At first, to clarify bad smells, we analyzed existing use case models to discover poor use case descriptions concretely and developed the list of bad smells, i.e., a catalogue of bad smells. Some of the bad smells can be refined into measures using the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm to automate their detection. The main contribution of this paper is the automated detection of bad smells. We have implemented an automated smell detector for 22 bad smells at first and assessed its usefulness by an experiment. As a result, the first version of our tool got a precision ratio of 0.591 and recall ratio of 0.981.