Program Execution Monitoring with Scenario Implementation Models

Abstract

Scenarios have become an important concept for understanding and specifying the required behaviors for a system and its components. To gain confidence for the correctness of the implementation, software developers must compare the scenarios identified during requirements analysis and software design with the behaviors observed during execution. This paper presents an execution monitoring framework that facilitates such a comparison. The framework allows the software developers to specify, in scenario implementation models, how the scenarios are expected to be implemented and used in the program. Enhanced with statements that check properties of the scenarios or visualize the progress of the scenarios, these models can be used to check at runtime whether the scenarios have been implemented and used correctly. Our initial case study indicates that the framework can be useful for uncovering bugs.