Automatic Extraction of Analysis Class Diagrams from Use Cases

At the early phase of software development, functional requirements of the software often need to be represented in the developer's language, resulting in a so-called analysis model. Current works in literature aim to increase automation in software development by either generating automatically the analysis model from a use case specification or transforming the analysis model to a design model. However, up to now, to precisely specify use cases is still a challenge, preventing us from realizing this aim. This paper proposes a method to extract analysis classes from a use case specification. Within our method, use cases are represented using our domain-specific modeling language named USL. We then define algorithms with transformation rules as a representation of analysis patterns in order to extract analysis classes from the USL use case model. We develop a support tool for our method in which transformation rules are realized using the ATL model-to-model transformation technique.