The Relationship between Traditional Requirements and Use Cases

Terry Bahill
Systems and Industrial Engineering
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721-0020
terry@sie.arizona.edu
http://www.sie.arizona.edu/sysengr/slides/reqsInUseCases.ppt
Copyright © 2004 Bahill

For many years systems engineers have produced a traditional system requirements specification containing shall-statement requirements (textual statements of imperative). The rapid adoption of use case modeling for capturing functional requirements in the software community has caused systems engineers to examine the utility of use case models for capturing system-level functional requirements. A transition from traditional shall-statement requirements to use case modeling has raised many issues and questions. This paper advocates for a unified requirements engineering method in which use case modeling and traditional shall-statement requirements are applied together to effectively express both functional and non-functional requirements for complex, hierarchical systems. This paper also presents a practical method for deriving functional requirements from the use case text to produce traditional shall-statement requirements when required.

The slides for this talk are designed for systems engineers. This talk requires a CD ROM drive, PowerPoint and a computer projector. This talk takes one hour.