Requirements-driven automatic generation of class models

Object-oriented analysis and design has become a major approach in the design of software systems. Recent developments in CASE (computer aided software engineering) tools provide considerable help in documenting the output of the analysis and design stages of software development and can assist in detecting incompleteness and inconsistency in an analysis. However, these tools do not contribute to the initial and difficult stage of the analysis process of identifying the objects/classes, attributes and relationships used to model the problem domain. This research presents a tool, Class- Gen, which can partially automate the identi cation of objects/classes from natural language requirements specifications for object identification. Use case descriptions (UCDs) provide the input to Class-Gen which uses established natural language processing (NLP) techniques to parse and analyze the software requirements. Class-Gen has established analyse a requirements statement which is given as input to the system. The requirements can be in the form of plain text or the more formatted notation of a use-case description (UCD) although better results were achieved when UCDs has used. From this stage is generated a parsed use case description (PUCD) which is subsequently used as the basis for the construction (either automatically or interactively with an analyst) of an initial UML class model representing the object classes identified in the requirements text and the relationships that may exist among them. PUCDs enable the extraction of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs from traditional UCDs for the identi cation of objects/classes and relationships. Class-Gen then allows the initial class model to be refined by a human expert (a software engineer) to produce a class model as output. Class-Gen has been evaluated against a collection of unseen software requirements texts. The results of the evaluation are very encouraging and demonstrate that tools such as Class-Gen have the potential to assist with an important task in the software development process.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo