Abstract

Rigorous modelling of the intended behaviour of software intensive systems has been shown to be successfull in uncovering requirements and design flaws. However, the impact that behaviour modelling has had among practitioners is limited. The construction of behaviour models remains a difficult and laborious task that requires significant expertise. In addition, traditional approaches to behaviour models require complete descriptions of the system behaviour up to some level of abstraction. This completeness assumption is limiting in the context of software development process best practices which include iterative development, adoption of use-case and scenario-based techniques and viewpoint- or stakeholder-based analysis; practices which require modelling and analysis in the presence of partial information about system behaviour. Our aim is to support the iterative and incremental construction of behaviour models by means of construction,composition and analysis of partial, heterogeneous, yet formal,descriptions of behaviour. In this talk we discuss how modal transitions systems can provide the basis for such support and present some of the model synthesis and composition techniques we have developed.

Biography

Sebastian Uchitel holds a Readership at Imperial College London and Profesorship at University of Buenos Aires. His research interests are in behavior modeling and analysis of requirements and design for complex software-intensive systems. His research focuses on partial behaviour modelling, including scenario-based specifications, behaviour model synthesis and modal transition systems. His research also includes goal-oriented requirements engineering, reliability, software architectures and service-oriented architectures. Dr.Uchitel is currently associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the Requirements Engineering Journal, he was program co-chair of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2006) held in Tokyo and is the program co-chair of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2010). Dr Uchitel has recently been distinguished with the Philip Leverhulme Prize.