Exploring the Students' Perception of Use Case Diagram: A Case Study

In software engineering, system modeling is an essential stage for presenting an abstract model of a system from various perspectives. A use case diagram is a model that illustrates the interaction between actors and the system's services. It uses the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and consists of symbols representing actors, use cases, and different types of relationships. However, some undergraduate students find this challenging and may misunderstand how to represent a system using a use case diagram. In this research, we conducted a case study to analyze the misunderstandings faced by undergraduate students. Our study aims to assist instructors in teaching use case diagrams by highlighting these points, which can help in learning software engineering concepts. The results of our study showed that students struggled with differentiating between the various relationships between use cases, identifying the role of supporting actors, and providing correct use case names. These issues contributed to increased incompleteness, inconsistency, and ambiguity in the use case diagrams.