Automatic Conceptual Analysis of User Requirements with the Requirements Engineering Assistance Diagnostic (READ) Tool

This paper describes an elaborate methodology that constitutes a proof of concept for the idea that a conceptual knowledge on the software to be developed can be acquired through an automated process, with a corpus of textual requirement documents as input and diagrams representing its static (domain model) and dynamic (context use-case model) aspects, as output. An improved domain model is generated by injecting domain-related missing information provided by Expert Comparable Contextual (ECC) models, which are extracted from reusable domain-specific data models. The dynamic view abstracts the main functionalities of the software as a context use-case model. The paper describes the architecture of the Requirements Engineering Assistance Diagnostic (READ) tool implementing our methodology which will guide the developers in their in-depth study of the requirements text and in the timely identification of risks that poorly specified requirements might introduce into the project.