Transactions on Engineering Technologies

Abstract

An existing software system sometimes needs to be redesigned to accommodate various change requirements. Since incomplete software requirements will lead to incorrect design of the new system, the system analyst needs to verify that the gathered requirements for the new system are complete, i.e., those that should be retained in the new system are not missing and those that are changed or newly introduced are included. This paper presents a method to help the system analyst to verify the redesign of the software system. As an initial model created from the new software requirements, the conceptual UML class diagram of the new system is compared with that of the existing system. The comparison algorithm called S-UMLDiff considers similarity of the diagram structure and semantic similarity of names in the two diagrams. The reported similarities and differences between the diagrams can assist the system analyst in reviewing the conceptual model of the new system to verify early on whether the new design is correct and built upon a complete set of change requirements. The paper also presents a comparison tool and good results of the evaluation of S-UMLDiff performance.