Title
Extracting High-Level Functional Design from Software Requirements
Abstract
Practitioners spend significant amounts of time creating high-level design from requirements. Though there exist methodologies to describe and manage requirements and design artifacts, there is not yet an automated way to faithfully translate a requirement into a high-level design. While it is extremely difficult to generate design elements from free-form natural language due to its inherent ambiguity, it is possible to significantly improve the accuracy of the design from relatively structured and constrained natural language. In this paper we propose a technique to generate high-level class diagrams from a set of requirements, using a set of requirement-specific heuristics. In this approach, we leverage work we had previously done to first process a requirement statement to classify it into a requirement type, and then break it into various constituents. Depending on the requirement type and its constituents, our heuristics then discover a functional design comprising of coarse-grained modules, their relationships and responsibilities. We express the design as a UML class diagram in IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA) format. Our preliminary investigation shows that the resulting class diagram is rich, and can be used by practitioners as a basis for further design.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/APSEC.2009.63
APSEC
Keywords
Field
DocType
software requirements,high-level design,requirement statement,high-level class diagram,requirement type,free-form natural language,extracting high-level functional design,design element,resulting class diagram,uml class diagram,design artifact,functional design,process control,systems analysis,business,unified modeling language,software architecture,computer architecture,high level design,natural languages,terminology,natural language,data mining,class diagram
Functional requirement,High-level design,Software design,Programming language,Software engineering,Systems engineering,Computer science,Functional design,Requirement,Non-functional requirement,Software requirements,Class diagram
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1530-1362
5
0.47
References 
Authors
11
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vibhu Saujanya Sharma117421.65
Santonu Sarkar231933.27
Kunal Verma31682127.24
Arun Panayappan450.47
Alex Kass5719.06