Rebuilding Web Application Requirements Based on User Navigation

Abstract

Use cases have been used to describe functional requirements of information systems in a natural language. In the design phase, use cases can be used to construct design model and then the model can be checked by some static analysis techniques. Since errors could be created while the design is refined and bugs could be planted in the implementation, after going through the software developing process, it is still question if the resulting system satisfies the original requirements. In this paper, we propose a new technique to rebuild use cases for web applications, thus we can compare the generated use cases with the designed use cases. For a web application, due to its special navigation character, we can get rich information in the log file while the user navigates the web. From the log file, we extract raw data that contains basic structures of the use case. After applying Natural Language Processing technique, we determine the boundary of raw data, reduce the data redundancy, and adjust the sentence, finally, we rebuild the use cases. Standford Parser has been employed to perform the sentence analysis for us. A prototype has been developed to support our technique.