Bridging the gap between Requirements Analysis and Design

J. Börstler, Th. Janning

	   The cost-effective development of high-quality software
	   heavily depends on methods, languages and tools applied to
	   the development process in the first phases of the software
	   lifecycle, i.e. require- ments engineering and design. To
	   take full advantage of modern languages for requirements
	   engineering and design tools are needed, which (a) assist in
	   the development of a software architecture, and which (b)
	   assist in consistency control between the requirements de-
	   finition and the design (traceability).

	   There have been several approaches to generate a design from
	   a given requirements definition starting with Structured
	   Analysis/Structured Design up to the recent Object Oriented
	   Analysis/Object Oriented Design discussion. Most of these
	   transformation processes have the disadvantage of being
	   unidirectional and/or batch-oriented, i.e.  they do not
	   allow for the propagation of incremental changes from the
	   requirements definition to the design or vice versa.

	   In this paper we describe the transformation between an
	   integrated requirements engineering language based on
	   Structured Analysis and the Entity Relationship Model
	   on one side and a modern design langu- age on the other
	   side. The proposed transformation tool works incre- mentally
	   and is sensitive to changes to already transformed parts.
	   We highlight the potential but also the limits of such a
	   transfor- mation.