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STAIRS towards formal design with sequence diagrams

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Abstract

The paper presents STAIRS [1], an approach to the compositional development of UML interactions supporting the specification of mandatory as well as potential behavior. STAIRS has been designed to facilitate the use of interactions for requirement capture as well as test specification. STAIRS assigns a precise interpretation to the various steps in incremental system development based on an approach to refinement known from the field of formal methods and provides thereby a foundation for compositional analysis. An interaction may characterize three main kinds of traces. A trace may be (1) positive in the sense that it is valid, legal or desirable, (2) negative meaning that it is invalid, illegal or undesirable, or (3) inconclusive meaning that it is considered irrelevant for the interaction in question. The basic increments in system development proposed by STAIRS, are structured into three main kinds referred to as supplementing, narrowing and detailing. Supplementing categorizes inconclusive traces as either positive or negative. Narrowing reduces the set of positive traces to capture new design decisions or to match the problem more adequately. Detailing involves introducing a more detailed description without significantly altering the externally observable behavior.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway

    Øystein Haugen & Ragnhild Kobro Runde

  2. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo and Ericsson, Norway

    Knut Eilif Husa

  3. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo and SINTEF ICT, Norway

    Ketil Stølen

Authors
  1. Øystein Haugen
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  2. Knut Eilif Husa
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  3. Ragnhild Kobro Runde
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  4. Ketil Stølen
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Correspondence to Ketil Stølen.

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Haugen, Ø., Husa, K.E., Runde, R.K. et al. STAIRS towards formal design with sequence diagrams. Softw Syst Model 4, 355–357 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-005-0087-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-005-0087-0

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