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Use cases have been widely accepted and acknowledged as a specification tool for specifying the functional requirements of a software system. Many variations of use cases exist which tries to address the issues such as their completeness, degree of formalism, automated information extraction, usability, and pertinence.
The aim of this systematic review is to examine the existing literature for the evolution of the use cases, their applications, quality assessments, open issues, and the future directions.
Use cases have been evolved from initial plain, semi-formal textual descriptions to a more formal template structure facilitating automated information extraction in various software development life cycle activities such as requirement documentation, requirement analysis, requirement validation, domain modeling, test case generation, planning and estimation, and maintenance. The issues that remain to be sorted out are (1) the right degree of formalism, (2) the efficient change management, (3) the industrial relevance, and (4) assessment of the quality of the specification. Additionally, its synergy with other software models that are used in the development processes is an issue that needs to be addressed.