Linking software requirements and conceptual models: A systematic literature review

Identification of stakeholder needs and documentation of software requirements are the critical steps to launch a software project. Natural language requirements serve as an agreement among the project stakeholders and they must be transformed into easy-to-understand conceptual models to avoid communication problems. Although conceptual models are mostly created manually with human involvement from the software team, it is seen in recent times that there is a significant increase in studies that automatically generate conceptual models from software requirements. In this study, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) based on the search of forty-four primary studies (published between 1996 and 2020), which automatically transform software requirements into conceptual models, is reported. These studies are evaluated regarding their approaches, functionalities, dataset used, evaluation methods, generated model types, and languages supported. Finally, several improvable points in the current approaches are highlighted and suggestions are provided as further works. (C) 2020 Karabuk University. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V