Generative Sequence Diagrams with Textual Annotations.
Thomas Gehrke, Thomas Firley · 1999
Interaction diagrams like Message Sequence Charts and the Sequence Diagrams of UML can be used to describe a set of possible interaction sequences which are all correct system behaviour. These so-called generative diagrams make use of complex graphical elements in order to specify iteration or choice. However, heavy use of these elements can lead to overcharging and, therefore, may decrease the readability of diagrams. Moreover, many specication tools do not support the complex graphical elements. Therefore, we introduce a small language for textual annotations which can be used to specify the more involved elements of generative interaction diagrams. This language has been successfully applied in an industrial project. 1 Introduction The Unied Modeling Language (UML) [6, 1, 8] has recently been suggested as an integrated approach for engineering object-oriented systems. UML denes a variety of graphical diagram models for specifying and documenting object-oriented systems...