Transition from Analysis to Software Design: A Review and New Perspective

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of automatic transformation of software artifacts from analysis to design, highlighting gaps and proposing a three-stage framework to improve reuse and synthesis of software designs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of existing methods and introduces a novel three-stage framework to address limitations in automatic artifact transformation.

Findings

Current approaches are insufficient for effective artifact reuse.

A new three-stage framework is proposed to enhance transformation processes.

The topic of automatic transformation from analysis to design is underexplored.

Abstract

Analysis and design phases are the most crucial part of the software development life-cycle. Reusing the artifacts of these early phases is very beneficial to improve the productivity and software quality. In this paper we analyze the literature on the automatic transformation of artifacts from the problem space (i.e., requirement analysis models) into artifacts in the solution space (i.e., architecture, design and implementation code). The goal is to assess the current state of the art with regard to the ability of automatically reusing previously developed software designs in synthesizing a new design for a given requirement. We surveyed various related areas such as model-driven development and model transformation techniques. Our analysis revealed that this topic has not been satisfactorily covered yet. Accordingly, we propose a framework consists of three stages to address uncovered limitations in current approaches.