Towards the Automated Conversion of Natural-Language use Cases to Graphical use Case Maps

Use cases are popular software engineering artifacts because their simplicity facilitates the comprehension of a system by all stakeholders. However, use cases written in natural language are inherently ambiguous and do not support automated reasoning. This article presents a new tool that implements the transformation from the textual use cases represented in UCEd, a use case editor, to a graphical notation that is designed to be as simple to learn and understand as use cases, while offering enough formality to enable automated reasoning. The target language we selected is the use case map (UCM) notation, part of the user requirements notation. We define the mapping between use case constructs and their UCM counterparts. The described translation, together with a suitable auto-layout mechanism, is implemented as a plug-in to a recent Eclipse-based UCM editor: jUCMNav