Scenario-Based Analysis of Component Compositions

Abstract

The behavior of a system comprised of collaborating components tend to be difficult to analyze, especially if the system consists of a large number of concurrently operating components. We propose a scenario-based approach for analyzing component compositions that is based on Use Case Maps (UCMs), but is extended with a few additional constructs for modeling component interfaces and connections. UCMs provide a high level, behavioral view on a system that is easy to comprehend by humans. However, UCMs do not have well-defined semantics. For this reason, UCMs are augmented with formal component interface specifications as used in the concurrent, object-oriented programming language BCOOPL. The combination of UCMs and BCOOPL interface specifications enables formal analysis of component compositions. This involves two steps. In the first step, UCMs and BCOOPL interface specifications are translated into a BCOOPL program. In the second step, the interactions between components are analyzed for system properties like deadlock and reachability. An important result of the combination is that the complexity, which arises when concurrently collaborating components are brought together, is tamed by considering only those usages of components that are actually specified in UCM scenarios.