The majority of software development projects utilize the use cases technique to define software requirements, which are necessary to determine not only the scope of the software itself, but also the sequence in which this software will be constructed. Currently, there are several proposals to define the construction sequence of software requirements, but most of these proposals lack of ease of use from the developer's perspective. This paper presents an approach to determine software construction sequences based on use cases precedence diagrams, which offers some advantages from the developer's point of view. In order to demonstrate the technique, we also present a controlled experiment performed by people who had at least two years of experience in software projects. The results of this experiment show that our proposed technique, unlike other ad-hoc techniques used, enables a more precise definition of the construction sequence. © 2008 IEEE.