Requirements analysis using similar sequence diagrams

Requirements analysis is a very important phase in software development. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to make explicit all requirements because developers and customers may not really know what they want. Development cost will become higher if the number of unknown and implicit behaviors is large, because developers will need to repeatedly modify the analysis and design models. This paper proposes an approach which suggests to the developer various behaviors, in the form of sequence diagrams, that the application may have but is not currently included. Our approach is implemented in a tool which searches a database of sequence diagrams for previously developed applications. Developers search the database for "similar" sequence diagrams based on the diagrams they have already developed.