Goal-oriented approach to creating class diagrams with OCL constraints

Abstract

Consistency between various phases of the software development process is an important aspect in software engineering. Without this aspect, software products may not satisfy users' needs. The cause of the inconsistency is that users' requirements may not be sufficiently reflected in software products. We consider this situation as a gap between the requirements and the products. We focus on the early phases of the software development, because we need to deal with the problem before the inconsistency in the early phases affects the later phases. KAOS has been attracting attentions and UML has been widely adopted, in the early phases, for requirements analysis and design respectively. However, the requirements analysis phase and the design phase are often practiced separately which may cause a gap between them. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach, to reduce the gap between the requirement analysis phase and the design phase, by generating UML class diagram and OCL constraints from the KAOS model. We propose transformation rules between operation models and class diagrams and rules for producing OCL constraints from the KAOS model. In addition, we carried out a case study to confirm the validity of this approach.