Automated Enterprise Applications Generation from Requirements Model

Enterprise applications can be automatically generated from a sophisticated OO design model based on model-driven approach. The design model contains information about how to decompose the system into components, how to encapsulate the system operations into classes as well as how the objects of classes collaborate to fulfill the functionality of the system operations. However, the efforts to build the design model from a validated requirements model are not proportional to the return. In practice, it is very desirable to have an approach that can automatically generate standardized enterprise applications directly from the validated requirements models. In this paper, we propose an approach named RM2EA, which can reach this goal based on the contract-based requirements model. We demonstrate the proposed approach through 8 case studies. The evaluation result shows that the quality and efficiency of the generated applications are equal to or even better than the applications implemented by developers: firstly, we demonstrate that a popular type of enterprise applications (i.e., a Jakarta EE application) can be successfully generated by customizing and improving the set of rules; secondly, RM2EA can generate more readable or maintainable code; thirdly, the enterprise applications generated by RM2EA achieve better performance test results. Overall, the result is satisfactory, and the implementation of the proposed approach has the potential to be further enhanced and applied to software development in industry.