Behavioural Views for Software Requirements Engineering

Abstract

This paper introduces the idea of a software behavioural view: intuitively, this is a complete description of the behaviour of the system observable from a specific point of view. We believe that a fully developed methodology based on views would significantly reduce the complexity of creating and understanding software requirements. In this paper we take the first steps towards such a methodology. We define a formal notation, Viewcharts, with a well-defined semantics based on Statecharts. Viewcharts gives a means for precisely describing views and their compositions. We show that Viewcharts reasonably capture the informal idea of a view by giving an example: a manufacturing control system. We show that Viewcharts have some advantages over Statecharts; in particular, Viewcharts add name space control to limit the scope of broadcast communication, solving a problem with Statecharts presented by Harel.