Deriving Message Sequence Charts from Use Case Maps Scenario Specifications

Generating scenarios from use case map specifications

“…In [14], the authors selected an existing notation (MSCs) because of the popularity of this standard notation and because it was compatible with tools (e.g. Telelogic TAU).…”

“…We can also generate MSCs directly, but this is done with the older, problematic transformation algorithm from [14], which was left available in the tool for comparison purpose. The traversal algorithm is also used for highlighting the visited path in a different color and to restrict the navigation of the UCMs to that selected scenario (bottom of Figure 7).…”

“…The traversal algorithm is also used for highlighting the visited path in a different color and to restrict the navigation of the UCMs to that selected scenario (bottom of Figure 7). This functionality, which is useful for the understanding, exploration, and analysis of complex UCMs, was available in [14] but now it uses our new algorithm.…”

“…It is depth-first because it keeps traversing the path elements until a stop point (AND-join, waiting place, or timer) is reached, then it backtracks to get the next available branch of an AND-fork (in Fork_Stack) or the next start points (from Start_Points). This approach treats these three types of stop points in a very similar way, which is simpler and more robust than older algorithm used in [14]. The traversal is successful if Fork_Stack and Start_Points are empty at the end, the items in Path_Elements are all marked as visited, and the scenario definitions' post-condition expressed as a logical predicate on the Boolean variables evaluates to true.…”

“…UCMs are very abstract in nature, and they can be constructed and combined in very flexible ways. This problem was first tackled by Miga et al in [14], and their solution was prototyped in the UCM Navigator (UCMNAV, [13]), a multi-platform tool written in C++. This tool can highlight the UCM paths traversed according to scenario definitions (to be discussed in Section 3), and generate individual scenarios in the form of Message Sequence Charts using the Z.120 textual syntax [8].…”