| Rapid prototyping refers to the techniques to produce a software prototype early during the software life cycle and at low cost. The motivation of this study is due to the problem that the user and the designer are unable to understand and to verify the requirements specification whether the software system specified satisfies the real need. By examining a prototype, both the user and the designer can have better idea about what the requirements of the desired software system are and thus the total development cost is reduced.;In this dissertation, an approach to produce a software prototype is presented. First, the requirement specification is transformed to a requirements model. In this model, the requirements of the software system are represented as a set of interconnected components, in which the control flow, the data flow and the data structures are defined. The requirements model is then transformed into a code skeleton of the target programming language by a set of transformation steps.;The informal description left in code skeleton is then translated to code using a modified syntax-directed translation scheme. The syntax of the informal presentation is expressed in terms of an attributed grammar so that a bottom-up parser can be built to parse the representation and generate code. Furthermore a simple knowledge base will be used to assist the translation. A complete prototype will be generated after this step. Part of the prototype generation process has been automated. |
