Guest Editorial

Dear Readers,

This special issue of JOT contains revised versions of the papers presented at the “Open Issues in Industrial Use Case Modeling” workshop, held in conjunction with the UML 2004 Conference. The conference took place in Lisbon, Portugal, from October 10 to 15, and the workshop was held during the first day of the conference.

Use Cases have achieved wide use as a specification tool for observable behavior of systems. However, there is still much controversy, inconsistent use, and free-flowing interpretations of use case models, in fact, not even experts widely recognized in the community agree on the meaning of concepts. Consequently, use case models are dangerously ambiguous, and there is an unnecessary divergence of practice.

The purpose of the workshop was to identify and characterize some sources of ambiguity. It gathered specialists from academia and industry involved in modeling use cases to exchange ideas and proposals, with an eye to both clear definition and practical application. Some presented topics were discussed in-depth (the UML metamodel for use cases, use case instances, use cases in MDD/MDA, use case model vs. conceptual model, and tools for use cases specification), while others were left as open issues for future research. We hope our suggestions will be useful to improve the understanding of use cases, and stimulate further research to reach a stronger coupling between the use case model and other static, behavioral and architectural models.

After the presentation of the papers, the workshop continued with discussions and synthesis work, trying to reach agreement wherever it was possible. A full account of these workshop discussions can be found in the Workshop Report published in the proceedings of the UML 2004 Satellite Activities (Springer LNCS 3297).

The workshop discussions were extremely participative and fruitful. This workshop has been the first in a series of Workshops on Use Case Modeling (WUsCaM) that will be continued at future UML Conferences (from now on called MoDELS Conference). More information about the workshop activities can be found on the workshop web sites (http://www.ie.inf.uc3m.es/uml2004-ws6/ and http://www.ie.inf.uc3m.es/wuscam-05/).

Finally, we would like to thank the authors for submitting these contributions and the programme committee for their reviews.