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Cataloging Bad Smells in Use Case Descriptions and Automating Their Detection

Yotaro SEKI, Shinpei HAYASHI, Motoshi SAEKI

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Summary :

Use case modeling is popular to represent the functionality of the system to be developed, and it consists of two parts: a use case diagram and use case descriptions. Use case descriptions are structured text written in natural language, and the usage of natural language can lead to poor descriptions such as ambiguous, inconsistent, and/or incomplete descriptions. Poor descriptions lead to missing requirements and eliciting incorrect requirements as well as less comprehensiveness of the produced use case model. This paper proposes a technique to automate detecting bad smells of use case descriptions, i.e., symptoms of poor descriptions. At first, to clarify bad smells, we analyzed existing use case models to discover poor use case descriptions concretely and developed the list of bad smells, i.e., a catalog of bad smells. Some of the bad smells can be refined into measures using the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm to automate their detection. The main contributions of this paper are the developed catalog of bad smells and the automated detection of these bad smells. We have implemented an automated smell detector for 22 bad smells at first and assessed its usefulness by an experiment. As a result, the first version of our tool got a precision ratio of 0.591 and a recall ratio of 0.981. Through evaluating our catalog and the automated tool, we found additional six bad smells and two metrics. Then, we obtained the precision of 0.596 and the recall of 1.000 by our final version of the automated tool.

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information Vol.E105-D No.5 pp.849-863
Publication Date
2022/05/01
Publicized
2022/01/06
Online ISSN
1745-1361
DOI
10.1587/transinf.2021KBP0008
Type of Manuscript
Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering)
Category

Authors

Yotaro SEKI
  Tokyo Institute of Technology
Shinpei HAYASHI
  Tokyo Institute of Technology
Motoshi SAEKI
  Nanzan University

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