Using user specifications to produce system models following the MDD paradigm

Abstract

Involving final users directly in the design of software systems can generate important benefits. For example, it could improve the number of semantic modelling errors resulting from miscommunication between software analysts and end users. Another approach to the participation of users is to let them create business specifications. In this sense, users can describe business documents and their states. It has been demonstrated that the analysis of business documents’ specifications and the process to produce them is a suitable technique to define the requirement of a system and consequently to design it. In this sense, different approaches are presented that demonstrate the convenience of ultragraphs as a formal representation of business documents. Although this type of approach presents benefits, the high complexity of ultragraphs prevents its applicability due to the lack of knowledge that common users have in these technologies. The Model Driven Paradigm (MDD) has been widely promoted to handle the complexity during the software life-cycle. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to present an MDD based approach to develop systems with users. To demonstrate the applicability of this proposal, a transformation chain to obtain a relational model from user specifications is shown. This approach might reduce the complexity of ultragraph creation by applying the MDD specifications, especially automation. This will improve the development process with respect to efficiency and quality.