Semantically Configurable Analysis of Scenario-Based Specifications
Paper by Barak Cohen and Shahar Maoz.
In Proc. 17th Int. Conf. on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE),
Volume 8411 of LNCS, Springer, 2014, pp. 185-199. [Acceptance rate: 23%]
Abstract
Scenarios, represented using variants of sequence diagrams, are popular means to
specify systems requirements. Live sequence charts (LSC), is a formal and
expressive scenario-based specification language, which has been extensively
studied over the last decade. Careful reading of the LSC literature, however,
reveals many variations and ambiguities in the semantics of LSC, as it is used
by different authors in different contexts. Moreover, different works define
their semantics of LSC using different means. This variability, in both language
features and means of semantics definition, creates a challenge for researchers
and tool developers.
In this paper we address this challenge by investigating semantically
configurable analysis. We define and formalize the variability in the semantics
of LSC using a feature model and develop an analysis technique that can be
instantiated to comply with each of its legal configurations. Thus, the analysis
is semantically configured and its results change according to the semantics
induced by the selected feature configuration. The work is implemented and
demonstrated using examples. It advances the state-of-the-art in the area of
scenario-based specifications and provides an example for a formal and automated
approach to handling semantic variability in modeling languages.
Supporting materials