Integrating Natural Language Requirements Models with MDA

Abstract

The model driven architecture (MDA) is a framework for software development defined by the OMG (Object Management Group, 2006). The MDA initiative shifts the focus of software development from writing code to building models, separating the specification of functionality from the speci- fication of the specific implementation of that functionality (Miller & Mukerji, 2003). Key to MDA is the importance of models and transformations between them in the software development process. The first model of MDA is the computation independent model (CIM), which describes the business model independently of the software system to be implemented. The CIM is described with a vocabulary that is familiar to stakeholders. As it captures the domain without reference to a particular system implementation or technology, the CIM would remain the same even if the system were implemented mechanically, rather than in computer software (Meservy & Fenstermacher, 2005). CIM reduces the gap between stakeholders and software engineers (Miller et al., 2003). Recently, some proposals related to business modeling and MDA have appeared, for example, the use of activity diagrams (Mersevy et al., 2005), BPMN (White, 2004), or goal-oriented strategies (Birol, 2006). Several authors agree in the importance of using the “language of the business experts” (Francis, 2006) during the first stages of development, enhancing communication between the domain experts domain and software engineers. From the requirements engineering area, we have been working with natural language requirements models to describe the universe of discourse (Leite, Hadad, Doorn, & Kaplan, 2000). But, to fit in MDA framework, we have to map them into object-oriented models, defining a CIM that will be the basis for a MDA software development. To do this, we have proposed a transformation strategy and developed its associated tool, CIMTool, thus allowing the integration of the natural language models into the MDA framework. In this article, which is an integration of Leonardi (2003), Leonardi (2005), Leonardi and Mauco (2004), and Leonardi, Mauco, and Leoni (2005), we present the overall strategy defining OCL based transformation rules to derive a CIM from the language extended lexicon (LEL) and the scenario model (Leite et al., 2000).