Making Behaviour a Concrete Architectural Concept

. A practical approach is presented to making behaviour a concrete, first-class architectural concept. The approach overcomes the forest-tree problem that results when the only way of understanding behaviour in relation to the organizational aspect of architecture is in terms of sequences of inter-component interactions that emerge at run time (calls, messages, etc). The approach centers around diagrams called Use Case Maps (UCMs) that superimpose sets of continuous wiggly lines (representing signatures of causal sequences) onto arrangements of boxes (representing organizational structure). A powerful feature of the approach is its ability to express large scale dynamic situations clearly. This paper does not present UCMs for the first time, but provides new insight into their essence in relation to architectural issues, alerts workers in the field of software architecture who have not encountered them before to their possibilities, and introduces for the first time a demonstration-of-..

Use Case Maps for Attributing Behaviour to System Architecture

The ability to attribute behaviour to architecture is important for high-level understanding, designing, evolving, and reengineering all kinds of systems (from objectoriented programs to parallel and distributed computer systems). Scenarios are a good way of doing it, but popular scenario techniques, such as message sequence charts, that use intercomponent "wiring" as their starting point do not scale up well. Use case maps provide a new, scenario-based way of attributing behaviour to architecture that solves the scaleup problem. The notation enables compact, composite maps to be drawn to represent behaviour patterns of whole systems in terms of causal paths, without reference to "wiring". Through an example, the paper aims to convince software and system engineers that the approach has depth and adds value, despite (and because of) its simplicity and deferment of detail

Use Case Maps for Engineering Real Time and Distributed Computer . . .

Two major problems in the engineering of software -intensive, real time and distributed computer systems are, without becoming lost in code details, I) understanding how an implemented system works as a whole, and II) specifying, before implementation starts, how the required behaviour of the whole system is to be achieved. These lead to other problems, such as, long iteration cycles during forward engineering while various code changes are tried in attempts to fix erroneous system behaviour, and inadvertently introducing code changes during maintenance or reengineering that will damage correct system behaviour because there is a lack of backwards traceability to it from the code. This paper illustrates the application of a new technique called use case maps to solving these problems, using as an example a system constructed from a publicdomain, object-oriented, software framework called ACE. 1. Introduction Problems I and II identified in the abstract are common to all kinds of soft..

On the Extension of UML with Use Case Maps Concepts

. Descriptions of reactive systems focus heavily on behavioral aspects, often in terms of scenarios. To cope with the increasing complexity of services provided by these systems, behavioral aspects need to be handled early in the design process with flexible and concise notations as well as expressive concepts. UML offers different notations and concepts that can help describe such services. However, several necessary concepts appear to be absent from UML, but present in the Use Case Map (UCM) scenario notation. In particular, Use Case Maps allow scenarios to be mapped to different architectures composed of various component types. The notation supports structured and incremental development of complex scenarios at a high level of abstraction, as well as their integration. UCMs specify variations of run-time behavior and scenario structures through sub-maps "pluggable" into placeholders called stubs. This paper presents how UCM concepts could be used to extend the semantics..