A scoping review of auto-generating transformation between software development artifacts

Abstract

Every process within software development refers to a specific set of input and output artifacts. Each artifact models specific design information of a system, yet they complement each other and make an improved system description. The requirements phase is an early stage of software development that drives the rest of the development process. Throughout the software development life cycle, checking that every artifact produced in every development stage should comply with the given requirements is necessary. Moreover, there should be relatedness between elements within artifacts of different development stages. This study provides an overview of the conformity between artifacts and the possibility of artifact transformation. This study also describes the methods and tools used in previous studies for ensuring the conformity of artifacts with requirements in the transformation process between artifacts. It also provides their applications in the real world. The review identified three applications, seven methods and approaches, and five challenges in ensuring the conformity of artifacts with requirements. We identified the artifacts as class diagrams, aspect-oriented software architecture, architectural models, entity relationship diagrams, and sequence diagrams. The applications for ensuring the conformity of artifacts with requirements are maintaining traceability, software verification and validation, and software reuse. The methods include information retrieval, natural language processing, model transformations, text mining, graph-based, ontology-based, and optimization algorithms. The benefits of adopting methods and tools for ensuring the conformity of artifacts with requirements can motivate and assist practitioners in designing and creating artifacts.