Architecture of a Requirements and Design Tool Based on Message Sequence Charts
Hanêne Ben‐Abdallah, Stefan Leue · KOPS (University of Konstanz) · 1996
Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are increasingly supported in software engineering tools to capture system requirements, test scenarios, and simulation traces of reactive systems. The latest standard syntax of MSCs [12] offers operations to compose MSCs in a hierarchical, iterating, and nondeterministic way. The various operators are a step towards increasing the applicability of MSCs to more than a trace language. However, current tools operate on MSCs that describe finite, deterministic behavior and none of them uses MSCs as a language for requirements specification and design of a system. In this paper, we propose an architecture for an MSC-based tool to support the requirements specification and design phases. The main functionalities of the tool are: an environment for the composition of system models through MSCs, syntactic and model-based analysis of an MSC model, and resolving resource related underspecifications in an MSC model. The proposed tool also supports synthesis mechanisms as a means to integrate our tool with available tools, e.g., the SPIN model-checker. In this paper, we also review the theoretical results we have currcntly developed towards realizing thc proposed tool.