Enactable Descriptions of Use Cases: Teasing Out Requirements

(EDUCATOR)

Educator is a use case authoring and enaction tool. The adopted structure is that of <PrimaryActor> [Event] [precondition][postcondition]-<SecondaryActor>[precondition][postcondition]. Where an event need not have a secondary actor participating, users of the tool simply omit the secondary actor elements. Any secondary actors that might have been previously inserted can be cleared using the secondary actor modification dialog (see help files if need be for more details).

Once a user has written their description, it is hoped that they can enact it using the enaction capability bundled in the tool in order to visualize implied behaviour. Any necessary changes to the description can be easily made using the tool. Please follow the help files supplied with Educator using the Contents option in the Help menu.

Please download the tool zipped in the file Educator.zip. The unzipped file results in a windows folder called just Educator. There are 5 files in the Educator folder

1) Educator.jar for launching Educator (by double clicking)

2)badWords.use  for storing any words disobeying the CP guidelines

3)legalWords.use storing any words seeming disobeying CP guidelines but actually are not (e.g. names of people).

4) Pen is an example description featuring pen exchange between a lecturer actor and a student actor. A related description, Course registration is included in this description. Users can open the pen use case by using the File-open menu of Educator.

5) Pacemaker  is an example description featuring a cardiac pacemaker. The problem statement for this description is included in the help files. The Pacemaker use case description can be opened using the File-Open menu of Educator just as the description in 4 above. 

NB: A minimum of JRE1.3.0 is required to run Educator. This can be obtained free from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html for even a   later version of Java. 

we are members of the  Empirical Software Engineering  Research Group  at  Bournemouth University, UK