Automated Enterprise Applications Generation from Requirements Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces RM2EA, an approach that automatically generates enterprise applications from validated requirements models, achieving comparable quality and performance to manually developed applications, thus streamlining software development.

Contribution

The paper presents RM2EA, a novel method for automatic enterprise application generation directly from requirements models, reducing manual effort and improving code readability and maintainability.

Findings

Generated applications are comparable to developer-made ones in quality and performance.

RM2EA successfully generates Jakarta EE applications with customizable rules.

The approach produces more readable and maintainable code.

Abstract

Enterprise applications can be automatically generated from a sophisticated OO design model based on model-driven approach. The design model contains information about how to decompose the system into components, how to encapsulate the system operations into classes, and how the objects of classes collaborate to fulfill the functionality of the system operations. However, the efforts to build the design model from a validated requirements model are not proportional to the return. In practice, it is very desirable to have an approach that can automatically generate standardized enterprise applications directly from the validated requirements models. In this paper, we propose an approach named RM2EA, which can reach this goal based on the contract-based requirements model. We demonstrate the proposed approach through 13 case studies. The evaluation result shows that the quality and efficiency of the generated applications are almost equal to the applications implemented by developers: firstly, we demonstrate that a popular type of enterprise applications (i.e., a Jakarta EE application) can be successfully generated by customizing and improving the set of rules; secondly, RM2EA can generate more readable or maintainable code; thirdly, the enterprise applications generated by RM2EA achieve similar performance in test results. Overall, the result is satisfactory, and the implementation of the proposed approach can be further enhanced and applied to software development in the industry.