Validating software requirements with enactable use case descriptions

Use cases have gained wide acceptance since the standardisation of the UML by the Object Management Group in 1997. This paper addresses the inadequacy of use cases for expressing intra-use case and inter-use case dependencies. We present a state-based approach for facilitating explicit consideration of such dependencies in use case descriptions, and a support tool is described, which provides enaction of the state-based use cases to support validation. We outline an industrial study involving the specification of real-time monitoring systems, wherein we demonstrate that enaction of the state-based use cases highlighted important dependency issues that had not been revealed within standard use cases.