Automated Enterprise Applications Generation from Requirements Model
This addresses the inefficiency in building design models for enterprise software development, offering a practical solution for industry, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing model-driven approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically generating enterprise applications directly from validated requirements models, bypassing the need for a detailed design model, and demonstrates through 13 case studies that the generated applications achieve quality and efficiency nearly equal to those implemented by developers, with similar performance in tests.
Enterprise applications can be automatically generated from a sophisticated OO design model based on model-driven approach. The design model contains information about how to decompose the system into components, how to encapsulate the system operations into classes, and how the objects of classes collaborate to fulfill the functionality of the system operations. However, the efforts to build the design model from a validated requirements model are not proportional to the return. In practice, it is very desirable to have an approach that can automatically generate standardized enterprise applications directly from the validated requirements models. In this paper, we propose an approach named RM2EA, which can reach this goal based on the contract-based requirements model. We demonstrate the proposed approach through 13 case studies. The evaluation result shows that the quality and efficiency of the generated applications are almost equal to the applications implemented by developers: firstly, we demonstrate that a popular type of enterprise applications (i.e., a Jakarta EE application) can be successfully generated by customizing and improving the set of rules; secondly, RM2EA can generate more readable or maintainable code; thirdly, the enterprise applications generated by RM2EA achieve similar performance in test results. Overall, the result is satisfactory, and the implementation of the proposed approach can be further enhanced and applied to software development in the industry.