Emergent behavior is an important issue in distributed systems' design. Detecting and removing emergent behavior during the design phase will lead to huge savings in deployment costs of such systems. An effective approach for the design of distributed systems is to describe system requirements using scenarios. A scenario, commonly known as a message sequence chart or a sequence diagram, is a temporal sequence of messages sent between system components. However, scenario-based specifications are prone to subtle deficiencies with respect to analysis and validation known as incompleteness and partial description. In this research, a method for detecting emergent behavior of scenario-based specification is proposed. The method is demonstrated and verified using a mine-sweeping robot as an example. Furthermore it has been demonstrated in this paper that scenario-based specifications can be used in agile software development and that the proposed methodologies in this research can be utilized effectively in agile approaches.

is a Ph.D. candidate and sessional instructor at the University of Calgary. Her research focuses on creativity in electrical and computer engineering. Ms. Marasco is also an education specialist with EZ Robot Inc. and co-hosts The Robot Program, an educational webseries for teaching robotics through technology to thousands of students, educators, and hobbyists around the globe. Ms. Marasco speaks regularly at conferences and in the community on topics from technical work to technological impact. She has won ASTech and 3-Minute Thesis awards for her work in science communication and outreach, and received the 2016 CEMF Claudette MacKay-Lassonde Graduate Award for her work relating to the promotion of women in engineering.

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Lack of central control makes the design of distributed software systems a challenging task because of possible unwanted behavior at runtime, commonly known as emergent behavior. Developing methodologies to detect emergent behavior prior to the implementation stage of the system can lead to huge savings in time and cost. However manual review of requirements and design documents for reallife systems is inefficient and error prone; thus automation of analysis methodologies is considered greatly beneficial. This paper proposes the utilization of an ontology-based approach to analyze system requirements expressed by a set of message sequence charts (MSC). This methodology involves building a domain-specific ontology of the system, and examines the requirements based on this ontology. The advantages of this approach in comparison with other methodologies are its consistency and increased level of automation. The effectiveness of this approach is explained using a case study of an IntelliDrive system.

Providing engineering students with advanced programming and data analysis skills is becoming more important in today’s technological world. This paper presents the overview of a programming bootcamp designed to bring non-software engineers up to speed with software engineering over one 4-month semester. The design, implementation, and challenges of the bootcamp are discussed.