International Workshop

Open Issues in Industrial Use Case Modeling

held in conjunction with

Seventh International Conference on the Unified Modeling Language, UML 2004

October 10-15, 2004, Lisbon, Portugal

EXTENDED Submission deadline: August 16th

[Motivation] [Call for Papers] [Proceedings] [Organizers] [Bibliography]

[Schedule] [Pictures]

Motivation

Use Cases have received great attention as a specification tool for observable behavior of systems. However, there are still much controversy, inconsistent use, and free-flowing interpretations of use case models. Not even the internationally recognized experts in the community agree on the semantics of concepts. Consequently, in practice use case models are dangerously ambiguous. The workshop purpose is to identify and characterize ambiguity sources. It will gather specialists involved in modeling use cases to exchange ideas and proposals, with an eye to both a clear definition and practical application.

  • Alignment of textual specification and graphical representation.

o        Issues in this category include: use case relationships, use case standard templates, use case contracts, and any information missing or extra in the two representations.

  • Lack of a sound semantic connection between use case specification items and UML use case diagrams.
    • Issues here include, for example, the connection initially desired by Jacobson et.al. in OOSE that is not supported by UML. 
  • Collaboration vs. participation among actors of a use case.
    • How to distinguish an actor´s collaborative role from an actor´s participatory role in graphical use case diagrams?
  • Functional vs. structural view of use cases.
    • Issues dealing with expansion of use cases for representing functional characteristics of parts of systems.
  • Use cases composition.
  • Adding potentially missing relationships among use cases. 
    • For example, “Precedes” from OPEN/OML and “Mitigates” from Misuse Cases.

Graphical and Textual Use Cases

There are two main media for (UML) use cases: textual specifications and diagrams. These “two worlds” have been evolving in isolation to each other. The literature commonly emphasizes and promotes written use case specifications for functional requirements capture, which are organized according to a template; there is an implicit commitment to what a use case template should include. In contrast, use case diagrams have been used merely as an adequate graphical view on, or "entry point" to, these written specifications. Practitioners and experts in the community frequently warn against over-emphasizing use case diagrams and strenuously advise never to neglect the use case textual specifications: in practice a use case diagram serves as a support for text but not vice versa. Furthermore, the techniques in the textual world are much more expressive and powerful compared to the use case relationship capabilities in UML. Finally, UML does not provide graphical modeling means for many aspects used in the textual world such as linking use cases through pre- and post-condition relations. An important topic of discussion for the proposed workshop includes textual vs. graphical use case representations.

Call for papers

[PDF]

Workshop topics

Use Cases have achieved wide use as specification tool for observable behavior of systems.  However, there are still much controversy, inconsistent use, and free-flowing interpretations of use case models including their inherent ambiguity. One of the purposes of this workshop is to identify and characterize some ambiguity sources. A goal of this workshop is to bring use case experts together to discuss use case modeling with an eye to reach some level of consensus on its practice, interpretation and other current problems. Some proposed topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Alignment of textual use case specification items and graphical representation: use case relationships, use case standard templates, use case contracts, etc.
  • Dychotomic views of use cases: functional vs. structural...
  • Relationships among use cases: actors collaboration vs. actor participation, use cases decomposition, missing or novel relationships...

The target audience are researchers, lecturers and practitioners interested in use case modeling. The workshop will produce identification and characterization of open issues and promising avenues of inquiry.

Participants

We invite practitioners, lecturers and researchers interested in use case modeling to submit position papers on the proposed topics. The number of participants will be restricted to 15, by invitation only, upon acceptance of a position paper according to reviewer’s comments and overall fit with the workshop theme, so that a rich discussion can follow the presentations. Additional papers may be explicitly invited if deemed useful.

Submission

Position papers (4.000 words at most) must be submitted in electronic form (PDF format encouraged), following the same style rules and format established for the UML’04 Conference papers. Selection will be performed by an international team of experts.

  • Contact for submission: Gonzalo Génova ggenova[at]inf.uc3m.es
  • Please send by e-mail with the subject "UML04 WS6 submission".
  • Include a plain ASCII text file with authors' names, paper title and abstract.
  • Include the PDF file with full text.

Dates

EXTENDED Submission deadline: August 16th
Notification of acceptance: September 3rd
Final version: September 18th
Workshop date: Sunday, October 10th

Workshop activities

The workshop will have four sessions of about 90 minutes each. The first two sessions will be devoted to presentations (3-6 papers each, selected among position papers based on relevance and to avoid redundancy); the third session will break into smaller groups, according to the topics effectively considered by the papers; and the fourth session will allow discussion to synthesize a final set of issues and recommendations.

Papers will be made available at the workshop Web site at least two weeks before the workshop takes place, and an internet forum will be launched so that attendants may (should they choose) cross-review and discuss contributions, even before physically meeting at the Conference, and perhaps after it also; this forum and its contents will be considered as archival material and kept by the Carlos III University of Madrid.

Proceedings

Organizers

Steering committee

  • Gonzalo Génova (Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain) - main contact

§         ggenova[at]inf.uc3m.es

§         http://www.ie.inf.uc3m.es/ggenova/

  • Juan Llorens (Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain)

§         llorens[at]inf.uc3m.es 

  • Pierre Metz (Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland)

§         pmetz[at]fbi.fh-darmstadt.de

§         http://www.fbi.fh-darmstadt.de/~p.metz

  • Rubén Prieto-Díaz (James Madison University, VA, USA)

§         prietorx[at]cisat.jmu.edu 

§         http://www.cs.jmu.edu/faculty/prietodiaz.htm

  • Hernán Astudillo (Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile)

§         hernan[at]inf.utfsm.cl

§         http://www.inf.utfsm.cl/~hernan/

Program Committee

  • Gonzalo Génova (Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain) 
  • Juan Llorens (Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain)
  • Pierre Metz (Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland)
  • Rubén Prieto-Díaz (James Madison University, VA, USA)
  • Hernán Astudillo (Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile)
  • Shane Sendall (University of Geneva, Switzerland) 
  • Roderick Coleman (Free consultant, Germany)
  • Wolfgang Weber (University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany)
  • Sadahiro Isoda (Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan)
  • Joaquin Miller (X-Change Technologies, USA)
  • Guy Genilloud (IT/business consultant, Switzerland)
  • Steve Adolph (WSA Consulting Inc., Canada)
  • Paul Bramble (Free consultant, USA)
  • Bruce Anderson (Managing Consultant, Application Innovation, IBM Business Consulting Services, UK)
  • Ian Alexander (Scenario Plus Ltd, UK)

Updated: September 7th, 2005

Contact: ggenova[at]inf.uc3m.es