An automated object-based approach to transforming requirements to class diagrams

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a set of activities concerned with identifying and communicating the purpose of a software system and its contexts of use as well. The requirements explain the purpose of a particular system as well as its suitability in fitting the desired purpose. Hence, the loss of information and precision, during the construction phase, leads to a poor quality zone of the system´s target. Moreover, this problem becomes obvious in practice when using the classical approaches (e.g. scenario-based approach). Thus, OOADA-RE (Object-oriented Analysis and Design Approach for Requirements Engineering) has been introduced with the aim of breaking the gap between RE and other phases. It demonstrates a way to handling object classes based on the classical template of the user story, which is enhanced as follows: `“As a <;role>, I want to <;action> <;object>, so that <;business value>”´; this is to allow an automated creation of classes with objects and actions mapped and gathered straight from the requirements. User stories are also used as a communication mean with customer. However, the approach has not offered a way yet to handling associations between the mapped class diagram´s objects. This paper aims to tackle this issue and introduce the Constraint Story Card (CSC) upon which we suggest four templates in a natural language so as to manage the standard UML associations (Simple association, Inheritance, Aggregation and Composition) including association´s roles and cardinality management. We conclude this paper with an illustrating example to clarify our main idea.