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A Creative Approach to Reducing Ambiguity In Scenario-based Software Architecture Analysis

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Abstract

In software engineering, a scenario describes an anticipated usage of a software system. As scenarios are useful to understand the requirements and functionalities of a software system, the scenario-based analysis is widely used in various tasks, especially in the design stage of software architectures. Although researchers have proposed various scenario-based approaches to analyse software architecture, there are still limitations in this research field, and a key limitation is that scenarios are typically not formally defined and thus may contain ambiguities. As these ambiguities may lead to defects, it is desirable to reduce them as many as possible. In order to reduce ambiguity in scenario-based software architecture analysis, this paper introduces a creative computing approach to scenario-based software requirements analysis. Our work expands this idea in three directions. Firstly, we extend an architecture description language (ADL)-based language–Breeze/ADL to model the software architecture. Secondly, we use a creative rule–combinational rule (CR) to combine the vector clock algorithm for reducing the ambiguities in modelling scenarios. Then, another creative rule – transformational rule (TR) is employed to help to transform our Breeze/ADL model to a popular model – unified modelling language (UML) model. We implement our approach as a plugin of Breeze, and illustrate a running example of modelling a poetry to music system in our case study. Our results show the proposed creative approach is able to reduce ambiguities of the software architecture in practice.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Japam Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI (Nos. 25420232 and 16K06203).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Xi-Wen Wu

  2. Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK

    Chen Li

  3. Center for Creative Computing, Bath Spa University, Bath, BA2 9BN, UK

    Xuan Wang & Hong-Ji Yang

Authors
  1. Xi-Wen Wu
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  2. Chen Li
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  3. Xuan Wang
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  4. Hong-Ji Yang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xuan Wang.

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Recommended by Associate Editor Shuang-Hua Yang

Xi-Wen Wu received the B. Sc. degree in Jiangxi Normal University, China in 2012, and received the M. Sc. degree in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 2016. Currently, he is a software engineer in VIPSHOP, China.

His research interests include software architecture and software reliability.

Chen Li received the B. Sc. degree in computer science and technology from University of Science and Technology of China, China in 2003, the M. Sc. degree in computer applications technology from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, China in 2010, and the Ph. D. degree in computer science and technology from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 2015. Currently, he is a research associate in Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK. He has published about 34 refereed journal and conference papers. He is a member of China Computer Federation (CCF) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

His research interests include software architecture, software reliability and formal methods.

Xuan Wang received the B. Sc. degree in communication engineering from Changchun University of Science and Technology, China in 2010. She is currently a Ph. D. degree candidate in creative computing at Bath Spa University, UK.

Her research interests include creative computing and interdisciplinary research.

Hong-Ji Yang received the B. Sc. and M. Sc. degrees in computer science from Jilin University, China in 1982 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph. D. degree in computer science from Durham University, UK in 1994. He was a faculty member at several universities, i.e., Jilin University, China in 1985, Durham University, UK in 1989, De Montfort University, UK in1993, and Bath Spa University, UK in 2013. Currently, he is a professor in School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, Bath Spa University, UK. He has published about 400 refereed journal and conference papers. He has become IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Member since 2010. Also, he is a member of Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Peer Review College since 2003. He is the Editor-in-chief of International Journal of Creative Computing, Inder Science.

His research interests include software engineering, creative computing, web and distributed computing.

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Wu, XW., Li, C., Wang, X. et al. A Creative Approach to Reducing Ambiguity In Scenario-based Software Architecture Analysis. Int. J. Autom. Comput. 16, 248–260 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-017-1102-y

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