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A use case represents a unit of the functionality specification of a system. Industrial object-oriented projects have applied use cases to capture user requirements. Use cases can be used throughout the whole process of object-oriented software development [14]. But, the problem of how to write use cases is still puzzling even software experts [6]. It reflects the lack of a systematic approach to capturing use cases. The set of use cases in a use case model is unstructured regarding the structure of the problem addressed by an application. This paper presents a notion of a use case pattern and proposes using a use case pattern to guide use case capturing. A use case pattern encodes reusable knowledge on the structure and function of a specific class of applications. It guides the work of use case gathering. We illustrate the approach to use case modeling with several use case patterns.

Software size estimation at the early analysis phase of software development lifecycle is crucial for predicting the associated effort and cost. Analysis phase captures the functionality addressed in the software to be developed in object-oriented software development life-cycle. Unified modeling language captures the functionality of the software at the analysis phase based on use case model. This paper proposes a new method named as use case model function point to estimate the size of the object-oriented software at the analysis phase itself. While this approach is based on use case model, it also adapts the function point analysis technique to use case model. The various features such as actors, use cases, relationship, external reference, flows, and messages are extracted from use case model. Eleven rules have been derived as guidelines to identify the use case model components. The function point analysis components are appropriately mapped to use case model components and the complexity based on the weightage is specified to calculate use case model function point. This proposed size estimation approach has been evaluated with the object-oriented software developed in our software engineering laboratory to assess its ability to predict the developmental size. The results are empirically analysed based on statistical correlation for substantiating the proposed estimation method.