From Informal Project Management Artifacts to Formal System Models

Software systems are specified with formal artifacts such as requirements or architecture models. However, informal project artifacts such as bug reports, tasks or discussion threads also include relevant information about the respective software systems and their development. It is beneficial to externalize such information in formalized representations, e.g. to increase the automation of development activities. In this paper we describe a model that integrates formal system models and informal artifacts of software development projects. We show how this integration eases the manual transition of information from project management artifacts to system models, and discuss how this transition can be automated. To facilitate this transition we propose an approach for the automated identification of informal management artifacts, which contain information about functional requirements and other system specifications such as classes.