Automatic builder of class diagram (ABCD): an application of UML generation from functional requirements

Abstract

Summary Software development life cycle is a structured process, including the definition of user requirements specification, the system design, and programming. The design task comprises the transfer of natural language specifications into models. The class diagram of Unified Modeling Language has been considered as one of the most useful diagrams. It is a formal description of user's requirements and serves as inputs to the developers. The automated extraction of UML class diagram from natural language requirements is a highly challenging task. This paper explains our vision of an automated tool for class diagram generation from user requirements expressed in natural language. Our new approach amalgamates the statistical and pattern recognition properties of natural language processing techniques. More than 1000 patterns are defined for the extraction of the class diagram concepts. Once these concepts are captured, an XML Metadata Interchange file is generated and imported with a Computer‐Aided Software Engineering tool to build the corresponding UML class diagram. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.