An Automated Approach to Transform Use Cases into Activity Diagrams

Use cases are commonly used to structure and document requirements while UML activity diagrams are often used to visualize and formalize use cases, for example to support automated test case generation. Therefore the automated support for the transition from use cases to activity diagrams would provide significant, practical help. Additionally, traceability could be established through automated transformation, which could then be used for instance to relate requirements to design decisions and test cases. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically generate activity diagrams from use cases while establishing traceability links. Data flow information can also be generated and added to these activity diagrams. Our approach is implemented in a tool, which we used to perform five case studies. The results show that high quality activity diagrams can be generated. Our analysis also shows that our approach outperforms existing academic approaches and commercial tools.