A collaboration-based approach to service specification and detection of implied scenarios

Methods for service specification should be simple and intuitive. At the same time they should be precise and allow early validations to be performed, in order to detect inconsistencies as early as possible in the service development cycle. In this paper we present a service specification approach based on UML 2.0 collaborations. It aims to be a constructive approach, rather than a corrective one, as it is intended to promote understanding and help reducing the number of specification errors. We also address the detection of implied scenarios from collaboration-based service specifications, and propose an approach that limits the state explosion problem. This is possible since the detection analysis is modular and it is performed at a high-levelof abstraction.