Are use case and class diagrams complementary in requirements analysis? An experimental study on use case and class diagrams in UML

Abstract

Despite the status of united modeling language (UML) as the de facto standard for object oriented modeling, it has received controversial reviews. The most controversial diagram in UML is the use case diagram. Some practitioners claim that use case diagrams are not valuable in requirements analysis and some have even argued that use case diagrams should not be part of UML. This research examined the values of use case diagram in interpreting requirements when use case diagrams are used in conjunction with class diagrams. In other words, the study investigated the possible synergetic values and relationships between the use case and class diagrams in the context of requirements analysis. This study used theories from cognitive psychology as its theoretical and conceptual foundation. The data collection utilized the verbal protocol technique in which subjects were asked to think aloud as they interpreted the use case and class diagrams. The results show that the use case diagrams were more completely interpreted than the class diagrams. The presence or absence of one diagram when interpreting another diagram had no effect on the outcome of the interpretation. From the results, we argue that the use case diagrams and class diagrams depict different aspects of the problem domain, they have very little overlap in the information captured, and both are necessary in requirements analysis.