Detecting Emergent Behavior in Scenario-Based Specifications using a Probabilistic Model

Abstract

Verification of requirements documents is crucial for developing quality software products. Scenarios are powerful tools for requirements elicitation. Manual verification of the requirements documents is a tedious job. This paper presents an automated approach to detect emergent behaviour in scenario-based specifications using a probabilistic model. Emergent behaviours are the unexpected behaviours in software specifications that are not easily visible in the design documents but may appear during execution and cause risk hazards after the implementation. In this paper, we define the interactions between system components as a sequence of words in a sentence and predict the possible violation in the execution order using probabilities. We have demonstrated our approach with an illustrative example. Three different case studies are provided to manifest the efficiency of our approach.