An initial wise development environment for behavioral models

Abstract

We present a development environment that proactively and interactively assists the software engineer in modeling complex reactive systems. Our framework repeatedly analyzes models of the system under development at various levels of abstraction, and then reasons about these models in order to detect possible errors and to derive emergent properties of interest. Upon request, the environment can then augment the system model in order to repair or avoid detected behavior that is undesired, or instrument it in order to monitor the execution for certain behaviors. Specialized automated and human-assisted techniques are incorporated to direct and prioritize the analysis and related tasks, based on the relevance of the observed properties and the expected impact of actions to be taken. Our development environment is an initial step in the direction of the very recent Wise Computing vision, which calls for turning the computer (namely, the development environment) into an equal member of the development team: knowledgeable, independent, concerned and proactively involved in the development process. Our tool is implemented within the context of behavioral programming (BP), a scenario-based modeling approach, where components are aligned with how humans often describe desired system behavior. Thus, our work further enhances the naturalness and incrementality of developing in BP.