Muhammad Shaheed Abdullahi

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  Automatic Generation of Design Class Model from Use Case Specifications

  Very short description of the project.

  Transition from requirements analysis to design phase is one of the critical activities in object-oriented software engineering. It is quite expensive to fix an error caused during this process if discovered in later phases of software development. Several reasons can be identified as causes for the potential problem, but one of the major reasons is due to specification of software requirements in Natural Language format. The ambiguous nature of natural language, possibility of inconsistency and incompleteness could lead to missing information at this critical stage. Several approaches within Object-Oriented Software development such as Rational Unified Process (RUP), use of Class-Responsibility-Collaboration (CRC) proposes a way of deriving class models by performing textual analysis of requirements specification. However, direct derivation of class model from specifications leads to inadequate classes, since only domain classes can be identified at this stage. In addition, CRC’s textual analysis does not solve the issue of human error, which is inevitable.

  In this project, a rule-based method is proposed to enhance an existing tool named Educator that is aimed at providing visual prototype of use cases as a means for validation. The method proposes syntactic rules for writing use case descriptions, then uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to perform textual analysis on use case specifications and construct a sequence diagram as a weaving model, from which adequate design class model will be generated. A prototype tool is implemented to demonstrate working of the proposed method.

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