Replicating the CREWS use case authoring guidelines experiment

Abstract. Use cases have become an important tool in software engineering. There has been much focus on the diagram notation but relatively little on use-case descriptions. As part of a welcome and important research project into the use of scenarios in requirements engineering, the CREWS (Co-operative Requirements Engineering With Scenarios, an EU funded ESPRIT project 21903) team has proposed a set of guidelines for writing use-case descriptions. This paper describes the replication of a CREWS project experiment that suggests CREWS use-case authoring guidelines improve the completeness of use-case descriptions. Our results show that the CREWS guidelines do not necessarily improve the use-case descriptions, only that the subjects implemented varying numbers of guidelines in their use-case descriptions. Subjects in the control group implemented a significant percentage of the guidelines by ‘chance. ’ To further justify our results, we also apply a different marking scheme to compare with the CREWS approach. The results from the alternative marking approach show that there was no significant difference between the qualities of the use-case descriptions across the various groups