A conversion tool from traditional software development notation into UML

Abstract

With the advent of Object Oriented Programming languages, 3rd generation programming languages are losing their popularity, with the result that a new design notation had to be invented. While traditional software engineering is based on Data Flow Diagrams, Data Structure Diagrams, State Transition Diagrams and so on, the object oriented approach to software engineering relies on UML (Unified Modelling Language), with its nine different views to software development. However, although it may seem that Traditional software design and UML are far different from each other, they are not as it seems that UML is an object oriented extension of traditional methodologies. This dissertation describes an attempt to implement a tool capable to convert Traditional Software Design notation into UML notation. To accomplish this task, the program must be able to accept traditional design methods as input, and after applying some rules, it produces the equivalent UML output. One important point that should be taken into consideration, is that the meaning can't be lost during the conversion for no reason whatsoever. The rules that the program uses to convert the diagrams where extracted by observing the diagrams of each methodology and discovering the similarities between the two.