A Framework to Diminish the Gap between the Business Specialist and the Software Designer

Requirements Engineering establishes the process for defining requirements as one in which elicitation, modeling and analysis are tasks which must be carried out. This process should involve different stakeholders and their different viewpoints. Among these stakeholders, there is the software designer, responsible for creating models based on the information gathered by business specialists. However, this communication channel may create some "noise" that leads to information being lost. This loss produces a semantic gap between what is desired and what will be developed. The semantic gap is characterized by inconsistencies in the requirements represented by scenarios -- user stories in a behavior-driven context -- and by the conceptual model. This paper presents an interactive approach to the agile requirements modeling, thus fostering greater consistency between the artifacts of the scenarios and the conceptual model. This consistency is ensured by using a mind model specification which will serve as a basis for transforming the definitions of the scenario and generating a conceptual model represented by a UML class diagram. The mind model represents the main role of this approach, and functions as a bond that represents the business entities, thus enabling the requirements to be more consistent with the reality of the business.