A Graph Based Approach to Detecting Causes of Implied Scenarios under the Asynchronous and Synchronous Communication Styles

The implied scenarios are unexpected behaviors in the scenario specifications. Detecting and handling them is essential for the correctness of the scenario specifications. Prior researches focus on detecting those implied scenarios through error traces, and cannot identify where to be considered to handle the implied scenarios. Moreover, most of them do not consider the asynchronous communication style although the implied scenarios may vary according to communication styles. In this paper, we provide a graph based approach to detecting causes of implied scenarios under the asynchronous and synchronous communication styles. The semantics of the scenario specification is defined as a partially ordered set which is represented as a graph. Based on the graph, our approach constructs another graph which represents behaviors of a minimal implementation satisfying the scenario specification. Differentiating between the two graphs identify which part of the scenario specification causes the implied scenarios under the asynchronous communication style. In addition, our approach can be also applied under the synchronous communication styles by adding additional relationships to the two graph. To validate our approach, we provide two case studies.