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.