Understanding Use Cases: Harnessing the Power of Narratives to Comprehend Application Domains

We investigate how stories can be used in system analysis and design to better understand the application domains. The research question we explore is: How can we employ narratives as a complement to use cases to improve our understanding of application domains? To examine this question, we study the effects—i.e., recall and problem solving—of supplementing a use case with a user story. We focus on two features of stories that can facilitate comprehension, concrete thematic content and causal explanatory information