IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/lnichp/978-3-031-87880-0_13.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

An EBNF-Based Grammar for Use Case Specification

Author

Listed:
  • Marinos Georgiades

    (University of Tartu)

Abstract

This paper presents a use case grammar for specifying functional requirements, providing syntactic and semantic rules that integrate with a specific yet extensible vocabulary to form a semi-formal language for use case specification. Built on EBNF and implemented in ANTLR, the grammar ensures well-formedness and facilitates validation of such specifications. Core elements of the grammar include (i) use case patterns, which define structured sequences of action blocks to achieve specific functionalities; (ii) action blocks, serving as fundamental units of user or system actions, further categorized into atomic blocks for main scenarios and composite blocks for alternate scenarios; (iii) support for both design-free and design-augmented functional specifications; (iv) a hierarchical grammar structure that promotes modularity and traceability; and (v) mechanisms to identify and specify actors, related use cases, and alternate scenarios. This structured approach reduces redundancies, inconsistencies, and omissions while facilitating the validation of requirements; it also provides a foundation for generating automatically diagrammatic notations, such as use case and sequence diagrams, in future implementations. Ultimately, it accelerates requirements engineering and enhances the overall quality of functional requirements.

Suggested Citation

  • Marinos Georgiades, 2025. "An EBNF-Based Grammar for Use Case Specification," Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organization,, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:lnichp:978-3-031-87880-0_13
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-87880-0_13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:lnichp:978-3-031-87880-0_13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.