Automatic Generation of Data Flow Diagrams From A Requirements Specification Language

Escalating manpower costs in developing systems has caused an increasing need for greater productivity in system development particularly in the analysis and design phases. Productivity in the system analysis phase can be increased with the use of computer- aided tools such as SPSL/SPSA for specifying system requirements and methodologies such as structured analysis. A structured analysis and documentation tool-the data flow diagram-allows an analyst to model and document a system with relative ease; however, the manual production of a data flow diagram is a time consuming process Combining the production of data flow diagrams with SPSL/SPSA produces a synergistic effect on the increases in productivity and ensures the use of standards andthe completenessof the diagram. This paperdescribes the problems and design of the systemMONDRIAN that generates data flow diagrams from an SPSA database. A variety of placement and routing algorithms that address the layout problem are discussed. The results of a preliminary study of the effectiveness of these algorithms and the adaptations required to improve and refine the prototype version of MONDRIAN are presented