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TRAM: Transforming Textual Requirements to Support the Earliest Stage of Model Driven Development
[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2014.
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Abstract
Tool support for automatically constructing analysis models from the natural language specification of requirements (NLR) is critical to Model-Driven Development (MDD), as it can bring forward the use of precise formal languages from the coding to the specification phase in the MDD life-cycle. However, there has been a lack of tools for automatically constructing initial software models (i.e., analysis models) from NLRs. The MDD process assumes that an analyst creates the initial software models manually. Consequently, the traceability links between the requirements specification, and the software created according to this specification are not explicitly represented. Unfortunately, current MDD technologies have failed to recognise this intrinsic relationship between requirements traceability, requirements transformation and model transformation.The aim of this research is to develop a novel MDD approach for automatically constructing analysis models from unstructured NL requirements to support the earliest phase of MDD and requirements traceability. The proposed approach makes requirements traceability an integral part of model construction and transformation, a feature not adequately supported by existing NL-based transformation approaches. In addition, a human enabled model validation approach is proposed, and used to check whether the knowledge possessed by domain experts is correctly and comprehensively represented in the models constructed by the proposed approach. The results obtained are encouraging and demonstrate that the proposed approach can be of assistance the earliest stage of MDD.
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A proof-of-concept software tool written in JAVA programming language.
Keyword(s)
Analysis Models; Model Transformation; Natural Language Processing; Requirements Traceability; Requirements Transformation; Semantic Object Models