First Steps Towards a Wise Development Environment for Behavioral Models

Abstract

The authors present an initial wise development framework: a development environment that proactively and interactively assists the software engineer in modeling complex reactive systems. Their framework repeatedly analyzes models of the system under development at various levels of abstraction, and then reasons about these models in order to detect possible errors, to derive emergent properties of interest, and to assist in system testing and debugging. Upon request, the environment can instrument the system model in order to monitor or test the execution for certain behaviors, or even augment it in order to repair or avoid detected behavior that is undesired. The direction and prioritization of the analysis and related tasks is based on the relevance of the observed properties and the expected impact of actions to be taken, and is performed by specialized automated and human-assisted techniques that have been incorporated into the framework. The authors' development environment is an initial step in the direction of their recent Wise Computing vision, which calls for turning the computer (namely, the development environment) into an equal member of the development team: knowledgeable, independent, concerned and proactively involved in the development process. They have implemented their tool within the context of behavioral programming (BP) – a scenario-based modeling approach, in which components are aligned with how humans often describe desired system behavior. The authors' work thus further enhances the naturalness and incrementality of developing in BP.