Creating design from requirements and use cases: bridging the gap between requirement and detailed design

High-level design from requirements continues to follow a manual, process centric approach, with heavy dependence on experts. In this paper we propose "Design Assistant Tool" (DAT) that combines natural language processing techniques and common design heuristics to create a functional design from a set of relatively structured textual requirements and use cases. To create a functional design, DAT processes a set of structured requirements and use cases using a set of heuristics and identifies a set of coarse grained modules, classes, and data entities as UML models. In this process, DAT produces two important design artifacts, namely a set of functional modules and classes and a set of entity classes. The functional modules form the basis of application logic and entity classes form the basis of data model. Our early investigations have shown that the resulting design is a good starting point for the detailed design and implementation.