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Static slicing of Use Case Maps requirements models

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Abstract

Requirements specification is a crucial stage in many software development life cycles. As requirements specifications evolve, they often become more complex. The development of methods to assist the comprehension and maintenance of requirements specifications has gained much attention in the past 20 years. However, there is much room for improvement for model-based specifications. The Use Case Maps (UCM) language, part of the ITU-T Z.151 User Requirements Notation standard, is a visual modeling notation that aims to describe requirements at a high level of abstraction. A UCM specification is used to integrate and capture both functional aspects (based on causal scenarios representing behavior) and architectural aspects (actors and system components responsible for scenario activities). As UCM models evolve and grow, they rapidly become hard to understand and to maintain. In this paper, we propose a static slicing technique to enhance the comprehension of UCM models. The developed slicing approach is implemented within the jUCMNav tool. We validate the proposed approach using a mock system and three publicly available UCM specifications. The results suggest that, on average, the models can be reduced by about 70% through slicing without losing information required for comprehension and maintenance activities. A small experiment involving 9 participants also suggests that the understandability of UCM specifications and comprehension speed have both improved substantially by using jUCMNav’s new slicing feature.

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Notes

  1. http://www.ccse.kfupm.edu.sa/~jhassine/UCMslicingSoSyM/.

  2. http://www.ccse.kfupm.edu.sa/~jhassine/UCMslicingSoSyM/.

  3. http://www.ccse.kfupm.edu.sa/~jhassine/UCMslicingSoSyM/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the support provided by the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals for funding this work through project No. FT141006.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Computer Science, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, 31261, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

    Taha Binalialhag & Jameleddine Hassine

  2. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward St., Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada

    Daniel Amyot

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  1. Taha Binalialhag
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  2. Jameleddine Hassine
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Correspondence to Jameleddine Hassine.

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Communicated by Dr Jeff Gray.

Appendices

A Closure slices for remaining UCM constructs

Figure 27 shows closure (marked) slices for different slicing criteria applied to sample UCM models in Sect. 3.

Fig. 27
figure 27

Closure slice approach used with different UCM constructs as SC

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B Mock system slices

This appendix presents the results of the application of the static slicing applied to the UCM mock model of Fig. 19a with the slicing criterion (tests) defined in Sect. 5.1. For each example, we specify the map in which the selected respRef resides. Evaluation examples with several slicing criteria are shown in Figs. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, and 34 using the reduced slice approach. The same output slices using the closure slice approach are shown in Figs. 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, and  41.

Fig. 28
figure 28

Reduced slice when SC = (R17 in root map Fig. 19a, (x, j, k))

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Fig. 29
figure 29

Reduced slice when SC = (R9 in map Fig. 19b, y)

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Fig. 30
figure 30

Reduced slice when SC = (R14 in map Fig. 19c, x)

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Fig. 31
figure 31

Reduced slice when SC = (R2 in map Fig. 19d, x)

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Fig. 32
figure 32

Reduced slice when SC = (R1 in map Fig. 19a, (x,y)

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Fig. 33
figure 33

Reduced slice when SC = (R5 in map Fig. 19a, x)

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Fig. 34
figure 34

Reduced slice when SC = (R15 in map Fig. 19a, x)

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Fig. 35
figure 35

Closure slice when SC = (R17 in map Fig. 19a, (x,j,k))

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Fig. 36
figure 36

Closure slice when SC = (R9 in map Fig. 19b, y)

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Fig. 37
figure 37

Closure slice when SC = (R14 in map Fig. 19c, x)

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Fig. 38
figure 38

Closure slice when SC = (R2 in map Fig. 19d, x)

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Fig. 39
figure 39

Closure slice when SC = (R1 in map Fig. 19a, (x,y)

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Fig. 40
figure 40

Closure slice when SC = (R5 in map Fig. 19a, x)

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Fig. 41
figure 41

Closure slice when SC = (R15 in map Fig. 19a, x)

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Binalialhag, T., Hassine, J. & Amyot, D. Static slicing of Use Case Maps requirements models. Softw Syst Model 18, 2465–2505 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-018-0680-7

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