Generating BPMN diagram from textual requirements

Abstract

An interesting challenge in software requirements engineering is converting textual requirements to Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) diagrams. In this study, the BPMN diagram is used as an intermediate representation before measuring the functional software size from Natural Language (NL) input. The methods currently used for converting NL input to BPMN diagrams are not able to generate complete BPMN diagrams, nor can they handle complex and compound-complex sentences in the NL input.This study proposes conversion from textual requirements to a BPMN diagram for improving the weaknesses of existing methods. The proposed method has two stages: 1) analyzing the textual requirements using natural language processing and 2) generating the BPMN diagram. The output of the first stage is fact types as the basis for generating the BPMN diagram in the second phase. The BPMN diagram is generated using a set of informal mapping rules that were created in this study.The proposed method was applied to ten textual requirements of an enterprise application, which involved simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences. The experiments resulted in a suitable BPMN diagram with higher accuracy than obtained by other methods.