A modeling environment supporting the co-evolution of user requirements and design

One of the goals of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is to enable automation. It is, however, a challenge, when pursuing this automation, to include textual requirements as a model. It is even more challenging to maintain the consistency of requirements and design models, when changes are made to one of them during an iterative process. In this paper, we propose a modeling environment, built as part of the Symbiosis framework, to enable the continuous synchronization between textual requirements and the core design model: Object Model. The co-evolution is successful due to a fact-oriented approach. We performed two case studies to evaluate Symbiosis. Results show, that it does not take much effort to follow our methodology with the Symbiosis tool support, to derive a syntactically and semantically correct and complete design model that fully conforms to textual requirements. Keywords: Requirements, Natural Language, Fact Oriented Modeling, Model Driven Engineering, Object Model and Co-evolution.