iMER: Iterative Process of Entity Relationship and Business Process Model Extraction from the Requirements

Abstract Context Extracting conceptual models, e.g., entity relationship model or Business Process model, from software requirement document is an essential task in the software development life cycle. Business process model presents a clear picture of required system's functionality. Operations in business process model together with the data entity consumed, help the software developers to understand the database design and operations to be implemented. Researchers have been aiming at automatic extraction of these artefacts from the requirement document. Objective In this paper, we present an automated approach to extract the entity relationship and business process models from requirements, which are possibly in different formats such as general requirements, use case specification and user stories. Our approach is based on the efficient natural language processing techniques. Method It is an iterative approach of Models Extraction from the Requirements (iMER). iMER has multiple iterations where each iteration is to address a sub-problem. In the first iteration, iMER extracts the data entities and attributes. Second iteration is to find the relationships between data entities, while extracting cardinalities is in the third step. Business process model is generated in the fourth iteration, containing the external (actors’) and internal (system's) operations. Evaluation To evaluate the performance and accuracy of iMER, experiments are conducted on various formats of the requirement documents. Additionally, we have also evaluated our approaches using the requirement documents which been modified by shuffling the sentences and by merging with other requirements. Comparative study is also performed. The preliminary results show a noticeable improvement. Conclusion The iMER is an efficient automated iterative approach that is able to extract the conceptual models from the various formats of requirements.