Abstract
Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are increasingly used in software engineering methodologies and tools to capture, for instance, system requirements, test scenarios, and simulation traces. They have been standardized by ITU-T in Recommendation Z.120 [IT96]. However, various aspects of environment behavior remain underspecified in MSCs, e.g., the presence of resources for inter-process communication and the coordination of concurrent processes at points of control branching. Such underspecifications can result in ambiguities in an MSC specification and discrepancies between an MSC specification and its implementation. In this paper we characterize two consequences of harmful underspecifications: process divergence and non-local branching choice. We also present two syntax-based analysis algorithms that detect both problems.
This work was in part supported by the Information Technology Research Centre of the Province of Ontario and by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. ObjecTime Limited provided further support.
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Ben-Abdallah, H., Leue, S. (1997). Syntactic detection of process divergence and non-local choice in message sequence charts. In: Brinksma, E. (eds) Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. TACAS 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1217. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0035393
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