N19-2017@ACL

Total: 1

#1 Extraction of Message Sequence Charts from Software Use-Case Descriptions [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Girish Palshikar ; Nitin Ramrakhiyani ; Sangameshwar Patil ; Sachin Pawar ; Swapnil Hingmire ; Vasudeva Varma ; Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Software Requirement Specification documents provide natural language descriptions of the core functional requirements as a set of use-cases. Essentially, each use-case contains a set of actors and sequences of steps describing the interactions among them. Goals of use-case reviews and analyses include their correctness, completeness, detection of ambiguities, prototyping, verification, test case generation and traceability. Message Sequence Chart (MSC) have been proposed as a expressive, rigorous yet intuitive visual representation of use-cases. In this paper, we describe a linguistic knowledge-based approach to extract MSCs from use-cases. Compared to existing techniques, we extract richer constructs of the MSC notation such as timers, conditions and alt-boxes. We apply this tool to extract MSCs from several real-life software use-case descriptions and show that it performs better than the existing techniques. We also discuss the benefits and limitations of the extracted MSCs to meet the above goals.