Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Activity Diagram Synthesis Using Labelled Graphs and the Genetic Algorithm

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
Journal of Computer Science and Technology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Many applications need to meet diverse requirements of a large-scale distributed user group. That challenges the current requirements engineering techniques. Crowd-based requirements engineering was proposed as an umbrella term for dealing with the requirements development in the context of the large-scale user group. However, there are still many issues. Among others, a key issue is how to merge these requirements to produce the synthesized requirements description when a set of requirements descriptions from different participants are received. Appropriate techniques are needed for supporting the requirements synthesis. Diagrams are widely used in industry to represent requirements. This paper chooses the activity diagrams and proposes a novel approach for the activity diagram synthesis which adopts the genetic algorithm to repeatedly modify a population of individual solutions toward an optimal solution. As a result, it can automatically generate a resulting diagram which combines the commonalities as many as possible while leveraging the variabilities of a set of input diagrams. The approach is featured by: 1) the labelled graph proposed as the representation of the candidate solutions during the iterative evolution; 2) the generalized entropy proposed and defined as the measurement of the solutions; 3) the genetic algorithm designed for sorting out the high-quality solution. Four cases of different scales are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach. The experimental results show that not only the approach gets high precision and recall but also the resulting diagram satisfies the properties of minimization and information preservation and can support the requirements traceability.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Tuunanen T, Rossi M. Engineering a method for wide audience requirements elicitation and integrating it to software development. In Proc. the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 2014. DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.2004.1265420.

  2. Snijders R, Atilla Ö, Dalpiaz F, Brinkkemper S. Crowdcentric requirements engineering: A method based on crowdsourcing and gamification. Technical Report, Utrecht University, 2015. http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/techreps/repo/CS-2015/2015-004.pdf, June 2020.

  3. Groen E C, Seyff N, Ali R et al. The crowd in requirements engineering: The landscape and challenges. IEEE Software, 2017, 34(2): 42-52. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2017.33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Adepetu A, Ahmed K A, Abd Y A, Zabbi A A, Svetinovic D. CrowdREquire: A requirements engineering crowdsourcing platform. In Proc. the 2012 AAAI Spring Symposium on Wisdom of the Crowd, March 2012, Article No. 1.

  5. Hosseini M, Shahri A, Phalp K, Taylor J, Ali R, Dalpiaz F. Configuring crowdsourcing for requirements elicitation. In Proc. the 9th IEEE International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science, May 2015, pp.133-138. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/RCIS.2015.7128873.

  6. Pratyoush K S, Richa S. Crowdsourcing to elicit requirements for MyERP application. In Proc. the 1st IEEE International Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering, August 2015, pp.31-35. DOI: 10.1109/CrowdRE.2015.7367586.

  7. Murukannaiah P K, Ajmeri N, Singh M P. Acquiring creative requirements from the crowd: Understanding the influences of personality and creative potential in crowd RE. In Proc. the 24th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, September 2016, pp.176-185. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2016.68.

  8. Groen E, Dörr J, Adam S. Towards crowd-based requirements engineering: A research preview. In Proc. the 21st International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, March 2015, pp.247-253. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16101-3_16.

  9. Murukannaiah P K, Ajmeri N, Singh M P. Toward automating crowd RE. In Proc. the 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference, September 2017, pp.512-515. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2017.74.

  10. Rosa L M, Dumas M, Uba R, Dijkman R. Business process model merging: An approach to business process consolidation. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2013, 22(2): Article No. 11. DOI: 10.1145/2430545.2430547.

  11. Dalpiaz F, Brinkkemper S. Agile requirements engineering with user stories. In Proc. the 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference, August 2018, pp.506-507. DOI: 10.1109/RE.2018.00075.

  12. Sutcliffe A, Maiden N, Minocha S, Manuel D. Supporting scenario-based requirements engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 1998, 24(12): 1072-1088. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/32.738340.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Song X P, Hwong B, Matos G, Rudorfer A, Nelson C, Han M, Girenkov A. Understanding requirements for computer aided healthcare workows: Experiences and challenges. In Proc. the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2006, pp.930-934. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1134285.1134455.

  14. Ahmad T, Iqbal J, Ashraf A, Truscan D, Porres I. Modelbased testing using UML activity diagrams: A systematic mapping study. Computer Science Review, 2019, 33: 98-112. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosrev.2019.07.001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Nejati S, Sabetzadeh M, Chechik M, Easterbrook S M, Zave P. Matching and merging of statecharts specifications. In Proc. the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2007, pp.54-64. DOI: 10.1109/ICSE.2007.50.

  16. Sabetzadeh M. Merging and consistency checking of distributed models [Ph.D. Thesis]. Department of Computer Science, The University of Toronto, 2008.

  17. Rubin J, Chechik M. N-way model merging. In Proc. the 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering, August 2013, pp.301-311. DOI: 10.1145/2491411.2491446.

  18. Harman M, Mansouri S A, Zhang Y Y. Search-based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications. ACM Computing Surveys, 2012, 45(1): Article No. 11. DOI: 10.1145/2379776.2379787.

  19. Alshahwan N, Harman M. Automated web application testing using search based software engineering. In Proc. the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, November 2011, pp.3-12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2011.6100082.

  20. Dai Y S, Xie M, Poh K, Yang B. Optimal testing-resource allocation with genetic algorithm for modular software systems. Journal of Systems and Software, 2003, 66(1): 47-55. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0164-1212(02)00062-6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Wang C H, Zhang W, Zhao H Y, Jin Z. Eliciting activity requirements from crowd using genetic algorithm. In Proc. the 4th Asia Pacific Requirements Engineering Conference, November 2017, pp.99-113. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7796-8_8.

  22. Shannon C E. A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 1948, 27(3): 379-423. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  23. Fernando S, Stevenson M. A semantic similarity approach to paraphrase detection. In Proc. the 11th Annual Research Colloquium of the UK Special Interest Group for Computational Linguistics, December 2008, pp.45-52.

  24. Kondrak G. N-gram similarity and distance. In Proc. the 12th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, November 2005, pp.115-126. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11575832_13.

  25. Niwattanakul S, Singthongchai J, Naenudorn E, Wanapu S. Using of Jaccard Coefficient for keywords similarity. In Proc. the 2013 International MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists, March 2013.

  26. Simon D. Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms. John Wiley & Sons., 2013.

  27. Saraph V, Milenkovic T. MAGNA: Maximizing accuracy in global network alignment. Bioinformatics, 2014, 30(20): 2931-2940. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btu409.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Arora C, Sabetzadeh M, Briand L C, Zimmer F. Automated extraction and clustering of requirements glossary terms. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2017, 43(10): 918-945. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2016.2635134.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Lim S L, Finkelstein A. StakeRare: Using social networks and collaborative filtering for large-scale requirements elicitation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2012, 38(3): 707-735. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2011.36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Breaux T, Schaub F. Scaling requirements extraction to the crowd: Experiments with privacy policies. In Proc. the 22nd International Requirements Engineering Conference, August 2014, pp.163-172. DOI: 10.1109/RE.2014.6912258.

  31. Maalej W, Happel H, Rashid A. When users become collaborators: Towards continuous and context-aware user input. In Proc. the 24th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference Companion on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, October 2009, pp.981-990. DOI: 10.1145/1639950.1640068.

  32. Kessentini M, Werda W, Langer P, Wimmer M. Searchbased model merging. In Proc. the 15th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, July 2013, pp.1453-1460. DOI: 10.1145/2463372.2463553.

  33. Assunção W K G, Vergilio S R, Lopez-Herrejon R E. Discovering software architectures with search-based merge of UML model variants. In Proc. the 16th International Conference on Software Reuse, May 2017, pp.95-111. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56856-0_7.

  34. Debreceni C, Ráth I, Varró D, De Carlos X, Mendialdua X, Trujillo S. Automated model merge by design space exploration. In Proc. the 19th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, April 2016, pp.104-121. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49665-7_7.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technology (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Chun-Hui Wang, Zhi Jin, Wei Zhang, Hai-Yan Zhao & Wen-Pin Jiao

  2. Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Chun-Hui Wang, Zhi Jin, Wei Zhang, Hai-Yan Zhao & Wen-Pin Jiao

  3. School of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia Normal University, Hohhot, 010022, China

    Chun-Hui Wang

  4. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, 2007, Australia

    Didar Zowghi

Authors
  1. Chun-Hui Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Zhi Jin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Wei Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Didar Zowghi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Hai-Yan Zhao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Wen-Pin Jiao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhi Jin.

Supplementary Information

ESM 1

(PDF 91 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Wang, CH., Jin, Z., Zhang, W. et al. Activity Diagram Synthesis Using Labelled Graphs and the Genetic Algorithm. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 36, 1388–1406 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-020-0293-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-020-0293-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation