A systematic process for obtaining the behavior of context-sensitive systems

Abstract

BackgroundContext-sensitive systems use contextual information in order to adapt to the user’s current needs or requirements failure. Therefore, they need to dynamically adapt their behavior. It is of paramount importance to specify and analyze the intended behavior of these systems before they are fully implemented. The behavioral specification can be used for requirements validation in order to check if these systems will be able to achieve their goals. Moreover, the reasoning about properties of these systems, such as deadlocks, reachability, completeness and correctness of the system, can be supported. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to have an approach to specify the dynamic behavior of the context-sensitive systems.In this work, we propose the GO2S (GOals to Statecharts) process to systematically derive the behavior of context-sensitive systems, expressed as statecharts, from requirements models, described as goal models.ResultsThe GO2S process addresses the specification of the tasks required for monitoring of requirements satisfaction as well as the system adaptation according to the context, the operationalization of non-functional requirements and prioritization of alternatives to be used at runtime (variants). It is an iterative process centered on the incremental refinement of a goal model, obtaining different views of the system (design, contextual, behavioral). Furthermore, we conducted a controlled experiment to evaluate the statecharts produced following GO2S process (experimental group) in relation to the ones elaborated in ad-hoc fashion (control group).ConclusionsThe experiment results showed that the structural complexity of the statecharts of the experimental group was lower in relation to the control group. Moreover, the average of functionalities whose behavior was modeled according to the specification and the time spent to produce the models of the experimental group were higher in relation to the control group. Besides, the subjects agreed that the GO2S process is easy to use.