Transforming Software Requirements by Meta-modelling and Graph Transformation

This article describes transformations of software requirements. We start from requirements (use cases) in textual form. These are subsequently encoded precisely in UML 2.0 Sequence Diagrams (SD) by a modelling expert. The SD model is automatically transformed back into textual form to allow the requirements producer to check correct interpretation. Once the latter is satisfied, the SD model is transformed into a Statechart (SC) which satisfies the constraints specified by the SD model. This SC model can then be used to analyze properties of the requirements. This may involve adding information such as transition probabilities for dependability analysis, or even sufficient refinenment to allow for code synthesis. We use AToM3 to meta-model both SD and SC formalisms. From this, visual modelling environments are synthesized. In addition, the transformations are modelled graph grammars. We demonstrate our complete approach in an example.