Attributes help manage scope. Especially helpful in iterative development, attributes provide an easy way to scope manage each iteration of your project. They make more objective the process of deciding which use cases to implement in a particular release. Too often organizations decide which use cases to implement based upon personal agendas, emotions, or pet peeves. Poor decisions made early carry through to implementation and are more costly to change the farther the project gets in its lifecycle.
Attributes provide a simple way to assign non-emotional weight to use cases and requirements alike.
Traceability helps measure the impact of change and ensure requirements coverage. Revisions helps you track who changes what, when, and why, to provide an audit trail of requirement changes. This helps you measure the stability of requirements and concentrate on more stable requirements first, inherently diminishing the amount of change. To set use case attributes in Rose, right-click on the use case in the Rose browser, and select Requirement Properties Open from the shortcut menu. From this same dialog box, you can also establish traceability and view revisions.