Transformation of Requirement Techniques to Reduce Duplication of Work in Methodologies

Abstract

Abstract The existence of Commercial Software for many decades, has witnessed a vast assortment of diagrammatic and Non-diagrammatic software design and development techniques, leading to a tremendous amount of Duplication of Work. This has also lead to the existence of many legacy software systems which need to be transformed into modern ones to make them more efficient and scalable. Although a few transformation tools are available, none can yet comprehensively integrate most transformations. Preliminary surveys of the industry and academia done both by the researcher who authored this thesis and a previous group, regarding the Academic projects as well as the IT industries in Australia, Singapore and Sri Lanka, have revealed an enormous amount of Duplication of Work both in the industrial and academic software projects, where it also affected the documentation procedures, leading to a waste of resources and time due to duplication of work. This was due to the fact that, different modelling techniques which use the same data, are required for these projects. The above problems (Duplication of Work and the need to integrate legacy designs) were framed as a research question, – “How could the different types of transformations of Software engineering models be combined to expedite the software requirement analysis process?”. Its answer is an Ontological Framework, to define relationships of both the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Non-UML Design techniques established upon the Ontology of philosopher Mario Bunge, which was already used in Information Systems, via a branch known as “conceptual things” which could be extended to incorporate suitable newer entities. This makes it easy to interrelate the various diagramming techniques and transform one into another, in such a way as to accomplish modular transformations effectively. From the initial surveys, it was determined that Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), Class Diagrams, User Stories and Use Case Models were the most popular diagrams used as well as where the most Duplication of Work occurred, according to the data analysis conducted by the researchers. The Analysis of Opinions for transformations between different types of diagram (i.e. UML and Non-UML), were tested through three assignment based experiments given to undergraduates reading for software engineering subjects, due to their knowledge in this field. Those experiments involved ERDs, Class Diagrams, User Stories and Use Case Models, and vi they provided researchers with the most compatible UML and Non-UML diagram Transformations. An open source software was developed as the proof of concept prototype. The final evaluation of this research project involved the participation of individuals with industry experience acting as respondents using a Questionnaire and there were positive responses of over 91% for all questions in the feedback form, which inferred the success of this research, where both the major knowledge domains – the modular transformations between Use Case Models versus Epics and User Stories in Agile Software Development, as well as the modular transformations between Entity Relationship Diagrams and Class Diagrams, were evaluated.