Facilitating the creation of quality object models using a knowledge based system

In today's systems development environments, object models are becoming increasingly important. However, given the complexity of UML, it is difficult to create quality object models; further, while current CASE tools can aid in drawing object models, they do not provide much support for enhancing the quality of object models. To this end, we developed a prototype of a knowledge-based system designed to facilitate the creation of quality object models by novice analysts. Using a design science approach, we provide a description of the design objectives, the system architecture and implementation details, and discuss results of an initial evaluation of the systems' efficacy. The analysis of the system demonstrates its ability to reliably extract relevant information from use case descriptions, and can lead to significantly more correct classes, attributes, and relationships being identified; however, the analysis has shown that the tool has not prevented novice analysts from adding incorrect elements to object models. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011.