Automated software development and model generation by means of syntactic and semantic analysis

Software development is a global activity and the development of a software system starts from some requirement that describes the problem domain. These requirements need to be communicated so that the software system can be fully engineered and in the majority of cases the communication of software requirements typically take the form of written text, which is difficult to transform into a model of the software system and consumes an inordinate amount of project effort. This thesis proposes and evaluates a fully automated analysis and model creation technique that exploits the syntactic and semantic information contained within an English natural language requirements specification to construct a Unified Modelling Language (UML) model of the software requirements. The thesis provides a detailed description of the related literature, a thorough description of the Common Semantic Model (CSM) and Syntactic Analysis Model (SAM) models, and the results of a qualitative and comparative evaluation given realistic requirement specifications and ideal models. The research findings confirm that the CSM and SAM models can identify: classes, relationships, multiplicities, operations, parameters and attributes all from the written natural language requirements specification which is subsequently transformed into a UML model. Furthermore, this transformation is undertaken without the need of manual intervention or manipulation of the requirements specification.Software development is a global activity and the development of a software system starts from some requirement that describes the problem domain. These requirements need to be communicated so that the software system can be fully engineered and in the majority of cases the communication of software requirements typically take the form of written text, which is difficult to transform into a model of the software system and consumes an inordinate amount of project effort. This thesis proposes and evaluates a fully automated analysis and model creation technique that exploits the syntactic and semantic information contained within an English natural language requirements specification to construct a Unified Modelling Language (UML) model of the software requirements. The thesis provides a detailed description of the related literature, a thorough description of the Common Semantic Model (CSM) and Syntactic Analysis Model (SAM) models, and the results of a qualitative and comparative evaluation given realistic requirement specifications and ideal models. The research findings confirm that the CSM and SAM models can identify: classes, relationships, multiplicities, operations, parameters and attributes all from the written natural language requirements specification which is subsequently transformed into a UML model. Furthermore, this transformation is undertaken without the need of manual intervention or manipulation of the requirements specification