Application Engineering – Requirements Gathering

As a project for our Android Components course, we start development of the software by following the Guidelines for Rapid Application Engineering ( GRAPPLE).

The steps for development follow the acronym RADDD or RAD³. That is: Requirements Gathering; Analysis; Design; Development; and Deployment.

This post is the first part of the project and will be limited to Requirements Gathering.

My idea for the Android project, is a module for a native OCR component. There are many libraries tab allows for Optical Character Recognition. However, most of them require lots of configuration and code to achieve a reasonable outcome.

This new component would place all the elements for a workable OCR solution in a single component using the Open Source Tesseract library maintained by Google.

This post is the first of a series that will delineate the entire project development. We will start with Requirement Gathering as detailed on the SAMS’ book Teach Yourself UML in 24 hours, by Joseph Schmuller.

The Specific Application

As a base for this project I will concentrate in a specific Domain and in a specific application. The application will be a Recipe Book App in which the user would be able to take a picture of a recipe from a book or magazine and have the OCR module process the image and insert the resulting recipe into the App database.

Domain Analysis.

To understand the process of using an Android Cook Book App, and understand the domain in which it will be used, I started with a list of nouns and a list of verbs.

Nouns:

Recipe, food, lunch, dinner, meal, dessert, sweets, ingredients, measurements, cup, table spoon, tea spoon, dish, container, bowl, kitchen utensils, kitchen equipment, oven, stove, microwave.

 Verbs:

Analyze,  measure, prepare, mix, combine, cook, bake, fry, divide, multiply, add, scale, weight, serve.

Process

Next is the initial domain activity diagram describing the recipe selection process.

The diagram was made with ArgoUML, an open source diagramming tool. The interesting thing about this tool is that it can create java (or C and C++) code from its class diagrams. It also has an Eclipse plug-in for integration. However I have not tried that plug-in as yet. If anybody has had any experience with that plug-in, please drop me a note.

Process Activity Diagram

See here part two of the Android Components Class Project