Abstract. The paper presents STAIRS, an approach to the compositional development of UML interactions supporting the specification of mandatory as well as potential behavior. STAIRS has been designed to facilitate the use of interactions for requirement capture as well as test specification. STAIRS assigns a precise interpretation to the various steps in incremental system development based on an approach to refinement known from the field of formal methods, and provides thereby a foundation for compositional analysis. An interaction may characterize three main kinds of traces. A trace may be (1) positive in the sense that it is valid, legal or desirable, (2) negative meaning that it is invalid, illegal or undesirable, or (3) considered irrelevant for the interaction in question. This categorization corresponds well with that of testing where the verdict of a test execution is either pass, fail or inconclusive. The basic increments in system development are structured into three kinds referred to as supplementing, narrowing and detailing. Supplementing categorizes inconclusive traces as either positive or negative. Narrowing reduces the set of positive traces to capture new design decisions or to match the problem more adequately. Detailing involves introducing a more detailed description without significantly altering the externally observable behavior.
Haugen, Stolen, Husa, and Runde have written a series of paper on the compositional development of UML Interactions supporting the specification of mandatory and potential behavior, called STAIRS approach REF .
STAIRS - Steps to Analyze Interactions with Refinement Semantics
of Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Computer Science