Abstract
In todays industrial practice, behavioral designs of software-intensive systems such as embedded systems are often imprecisely documented as plain text in a natural language such as English, supplemented with ad-hoc diagrams. Lack of quality in behavioral design documents causes poor communication between stake holders, up to 100 times more costly rework during testing and integration, and hard-to-maintain documents of behavioral designs. To address these problems, we present a solution that involves the usage of (a) data-flow diagrams to document the input-output relation between the actions performed by a software-intensive system, (b) control-flow diagrams to document the possible sequences of actions performed by the system, and (c) Vibes diagrams to document temporal or logical constraints on the possible sequences of actions performed by the system. The key benefit of this solution is to improve the separation of concerns within behavioral design documents; hence to improve their understandability, maintainability, and evolvability.
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Notes
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In black and white printing the colours may not be easily distinguishable, but this distinction is not essential for understanding this chapter.
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In reality, this constraint is stricter, because an ATM blocks a bank card if a wrong PIN is entered three times in a day, not necessarily during one session.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Trosky B. Callo Arias, Alexander Douglas, Piërre van de Laar, and Teade Punter for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
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Güleşir, G., America, P., Benschop, F., van den Berg, K., Akşit, M. (2010). Creating High-Quality Behavioural Designs for Software-Intensive Systems. In: Van de Laar, P., Punter, T. (eds) Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems. Embedded Systems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9849-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9849-8_12
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