From play-in scenarios to code: an achievable dream

The article presents a general, rather sweeping development scheme for complex reactive systems, combining ideas that have been known for a long time with more recent ones. The scheme makes it possible to go from a high-level user-friendly requirements capture method, which is called play-in scenarios, via a rich language for describing message sequencing to a full model of the system, and from there to final implementation. A cyclic process of verifying the system against requirements and synthesizing system parts from the requirements is central to the proposal. The article puts special emphasis on the languages, methods, and computerized tools that allow smooth but rigorous transitions between the various stages of the scheme. In contrast to database systems, the article focuses on systems that have a dominant reactive, event-driven facet. For these systems, modeling and analyzing behavior is the most crucial and problematic issue