EPC vs. UML Activity Diagram - Two Experiments Examining their Usefulness for Requirements Engineering

Gross, Anne; Doerr, Joerg

doi:10.1109/re.2009.30

Cited by 17 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This section discusses some benefits of complementing scenarios and goal overview diagrams with activity diagrams. In fact, the usefulness of supplementing the requirements specification process with activity diagram has been studied in the literature [5,21]. However, in this article we show the benefits of activity diagrams as a complementary artefact to the existing agent oriented software engineering artefacts, which include other notions in addition to the ones existed in the general software engineering.…”

Section: Potential Benefits Of the Activity-diagramsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Requirements specification via activity diagrams for agent-based systems

Abushark

Miller

Thangarajah

et al. 2016

Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst

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Goal-oriented agent systems are increasingly popular for developing complex applications that operate in highly dynamic environments. As with any software these systems have to be designed starting with the specification of system requirements. In this paper, we extend a popular agent design methodology, Prometheus, and improve the understandability and maintainability of requirements by automatically generating UML activity diagrams from existing requirements models; namely scenarios and goal hierarchies. This approach aims to overcome some of the ambiguity present in the current requirements specification in Prometheus and provide more structure for representing variations. Even though our approach is grounded in Prometheus, it can be generalised to all the methodologies that support similar notions in specifying requirements (i.e. notions of goals and scenarios). We present our approach and an evaluation based on user experiments. The evaluation showed that the activity diagram based approach enhances people's understanding of the requirements, makes it easier to modify requirements, and easier to check them against the detailed design of the agents for coverage.

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Section: Potential Benefits Of the Activity-diagramsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Requirements specification via activity diagrams for agent-based systems

Abushark

Miller

Thangarajah

et al. 2016

Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst

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“…1 The tool supports the development of process model diagrams in the EPC notation, the identification of automatable activities, the development of related requirements models in conformance with the exemplified FAD notation, and, Figure 4: A screenshot of the prototype tool and the generated requirements document lastly, the generation of textual requirements documents in conformance with the approach explained in Section 3. As all the cases were conducted in Turkey, we implemented the generation for the Turkish language.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some authors even go so far as considering their use as mandatory [1,3]. However, the specific role of process models differs considerably among available approaches.…”

Section: Process Models and Requirements Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

A semi-automated approach for generating natural language requirements documents based on business process models

Aysolmaz

Leopold

Reijers

et al. 2018

Information and Software Technology

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Context: The analysis of requirements for business-related software systems is often supported by using business process models. However, the final requirements are typically still specified in natural language.This means that the knowledge captured in process models must be consistently transferred to the specified requirements. Possible inconsistencies between process models and requirements represent a serious threat for the successful development of the software system and may require the repetition of process analysis activities.Objective: The objective of this paper is to address the problem of inconsistency between process models and natural language requirements in the context of software development. Method:We define a semi-automated approach that consists of a process model-based procedure for capturing execution-related data in requirements models and an algorithm that takes these models as input for generating natural language requirements. We evaluated our approach in the context of a multiple case study with three organizations and a total of 13 software development projects.Results: We found that our approach can successfully generate well-readable requirements, which do not only positively contribute to consistency, but also to the completeness and maintainability of requirements.The practical use of our approach to identify a suitable subcontractor on the market in 11 of the 13 projects further highlights the practical value of our approach. Conclusion:Our approach provides a structured way to obtain high-quality requirements documents from process models and to maintain textual and visual representations of requirements in a consistent way.

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“…The paper [5] presents the experiment conducted to compare the notations of UML Activity Diagrams (ACTs) and Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs). One of the perspectives investigated was a customer or end-user point of view with focus on effectiveness during model validation.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical Comparison of Comprehensibility of Requirement Specification Techniques based on Natural Languages and Activity Diagrams

Hnatkowska¹,

Grzegorczyn²

2012

Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Modelling, Simulation, Verification and Validation of Enterprise Information

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Understandability belongs to the most important features of good quality software requirement specification (SRS). There exist plenty notations used for defining SRS, but still natural language (NL) belongs to the most popular. The specification written is NL could suffer from ambiguity, however it can be read by everybody without specific training. To eliminate, even partially, the drawbacks mentioned previously, SRS is written according to well defined guidelines and with the use of templates, e.g. use-case model consisting of a use-case diagram with a set of use-case detailed descriptions. Use-case descriptions are defined in NL or with dynamic diagrams, e.g. activity diagrams. This paper presents a controlled experiment which aimed at comparison of comprehensibility of techniques based on natural language and activity diagrams. The results of the experiment confirmed that formal notation is less ambiguous. Additionally, if a reader is accustomed to it, reading activity diagram not necessarily is time consuming.

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EPC vs. UML Activity Diagram - Two Experiments Examining their Usefulness for Requirements Engineering

Cited by 17 publications

References 7 publications

Requirements specification via activity diagrams for agent-based systems

Requirements specification via activity diagrams for agent-based systems

A semi-automated approach for generating natural language requirements documents based on business process models

Empirical Comparison of Comprehensibility of Requirement Specification Techniques based on Natural Languages and Activity Diagrams

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