Using Linguistic Patterns to Model Interactions

Abstract

The dynamic behavior of a system is elicited, specified, and analyzed by means of interaction modelling. This activity is important for object-oriented software development because it provides the information that is required to construct the system conceptual model. Several interaction modelling techniques have been proposed. However, this activity continues to be a complex and tedious task for the modellers. These problems arise from the intrinsic difficulties of interaction modelling and the lack of effective techniques and tools to support to the modellers. In this chapter, heuristic-oriented techniques and linguistics-oriented techniques proposed by several authors to model interactions are analyzed. In addition, a framework to facilitate and to improve the interaction modelling is described. This framework was conceived to be integrated into automatic software production environments. It uses linguistic patterns to recognize interactions from use case models. The patterns were validated with expert modellers. The validation process carried out and the main results are also presented.