Abstract

A major problem we humans have in the engineering of complex, computer-based systems is understanding and defining how the required behaviour of a whole system is to be achieved by its components, without becoming lost in component-centric detail such as internal state machines and the intercomponent messages they trigger. This leads to other problems, such as, long iteration cycles during forward engineering while we try various detailed changes in attempts to fix erroneous system behaviour, and inadvertently introducing detailed changes during maintenance or reengineering that will damage whole system behaviour because there is a lack of backwards traceability to it from the details. This paper proposes and illustrates a design method for overcoming such problems that proceeds, in a systematic and traceable manner, from UCM models (use case maps), to MSC models (message sequence charts), to ROOM-style communicating-state-machine models. For concreteness in a limited space, the method is illustrated by a simple example that is not representative of the complex kinds of systems we have in mind.

-- Gunter Mussbacher - 13 Oct 2005

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