Adv-EARS: A formal requirements syntax for derivation of use case models

Abstract

The development of complex systems frequently involves extensive work to elicit, document and review functional requirements that are usually written in unconstrained natural language, which is inherently imprecise. Use of Formal techniques in Requirement Engineering would be of immense importance as it would provide automated support in deriving use case models from the functional requirements. In this paper we propose a formal syntax for requirements called Adv-EARS. We define a grammar for this syntax such that a requirements document in this format can be grammatically parsed and the prospective actors and use cases are automatically derived from the parse tree. The use case diagram is then automatically generated based on the actors and use cases and their relationships. We have used requirements of an Insurance system as a case study to illustrate our approach. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.