Generating natural language specifications from UML class diagrams

Early phases of software development are known to be problematic, difficult to manage and errors occurring during these phases are expensive to correct. Many systems have been developed to aid the transition from informal Natural Language requirements to semistructured or formal specifications. Furthermore, consistency checking is seen by many software engineers as the solution to reduce the number of errors occurring during the software development life cycle and allow early verification and validation of software systems. However, this is confined to the models developed during analysis and design and fails to include the early Natural Language requirements. This excludes proper user involvement and creates a gap between the original requirements and the updated and modified models and implementations of the system. To improve this process, we propose a system that generates Natural Language specifications from UML class diagrams. We first investigate the variation of the input language used in naming the components of a class diagram based on the study of a large number of examples from the literature and then develop rules for removing ambiguities in the subset of Natural Language used within UML. We use WordNet,a linguistic ontology, to disambiguate the lexical structures of the UML string names and generate semantically sound sentences. Our system is developed in Java and is tested on an independent though academic case study

Tools for producing formal specifications : a view of current architectures and future directions

During the last decade, one important contribution towards requirements engineering has been the advent of formal specification languages. They offer a well-defined notation that can improve consistency and avoid ambiguity in specifications. However, the process of obtaining formal specifications that are consistent with the requirements is itself a difficult activity. Hence various researchers are developing systems that aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The kind of problems tackled and the contributions made by these proposed systems are very diverse. This paper brings these studies together to provide a vision for future architectures that aim to aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The new architecture, which is based on the strengths of existing studies, tackles a number of key issues in requirements engineering such as identifying ambiguities, incompleteness, and reusability. The paper concludes with a discussion of the research problems that need to be addressed in order to realise the proposed architecture

Spacelab software development and integration concepts study report, volume 1

The proposed software guidelines to be followed by the European Space Research Organization in the development of software for the Spacelab being developed for use as a payload for the space shuttle are documented. Concepts, techniques, and tools needed to assure the success of a programming project are defined as they relate to operation of the data management subsystem, support of experiments and space applications, use with ground support equipment, and for integration testing

Embedding Requirements within the Model Driven Architecture

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) brings benefits to software development, among them the potential for connecting software models with the business domain. This paper focuses on the upstream or Computation Independent Model (CIM) phase of the MDA. Our contention is that, whilst there are many models and notations available within the CIM Phase, those that are currently popular and supported by the Object Management Group (OMG), may not be the most useful notations for business analysts nor sufficient to fully support software requirements and specification. Therefore, with specific emphasis on the value of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) for business analysts, this paper provides an example of a typical CIM approach before describing an approach which incorporates specific requirements techniques. A framework extension to the MDA is then introduced; which embeds requirements and specification within the CIM, thus further enhancing the utility of MDA by providing a more complete method for business analysis