We present 1) a novel linguistic engine made of configurable linguistic components for understanding natural language use case specification; and 2) results of the first of a kind large scale experiment of application of linguistic techniques to industrial use cases. Requirement defects are well known to have adverse effects on dependability of software systems. While formal techniques are often cited as a remedy for specification errors, natural language remains the predominant mode for specifying requirements. Therefore, for dependable system development, a natural language processing technique is required that can translate natural language textual requirements into validation ready computer models. In this paper, we present the implementation details of such a technique and the results of applying a prototype implementation of our technique to 80 industrial and academic use case descriptions. We report on the accuracy and effectiveness of our technique. The results of our experiment are very encouraging.

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Use cases are a key technique to elicit software requirements from the point of view of the user of a system. Their prevalence is noticeable ever since the onset of agile programming techniques. Within SOA projects however, business process models are used for capability analysis and gap detection. Business process models present a global view of the system and hence are more suited for gap detection. Therefore, in practice both these forms of requirements continue to be useful and coexist. Often in big software projects and in distributed development environment such coexisting requirement specifications can grow out of synch. We present here a technique to semi-automatically transform use cases into business processes and to create mapping between them. By preserving the mapping between these forms one can enforce consistency between the two forms of requirements.

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