SBIR/STTR Phase I: Guided Generation of Software Requirements

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will investigate methods for improving the process of requirement definition for software projects. It will investigate how the stakeholder in a project can be constrained to create only those requirements that have good characteristics. The approach is to codify the domain comprised of "all tasks which can be implemented on a computer" and present the stakeholder with decisions to make about what will be implemented in a specific system. Use cases will be used to facilitate the process. After capturing the requirements, an initial object-oriented analysis model will be generated automatically from the requirement descriptions. The model will be based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). However, diagram notations will define the model in terms of UML metamodels rather than by diagram notations. UML modeling tools such as Rational Software's Rose can import the metamodels and create their associated graphical representation. This research will develop a prototype tool that will guide the stakeholder to describe requirements within a fixed format, and automatically create UML metamodels.