Behavioral Pattern Analysis: towards a new representation of systems requirements based on actions and events

• Authors: Assem El-Ansary
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM symposium on Applied computing
• Year: 2002

Requirements are descriptions of the application domain, the problems to be solved there, and the system(s) to be built in that domain to solve these problems. Many projects have failed because their requirements were inadequately explored or described. Experience is beginning to show several problems with Use cases such as lack of a precise definition that led most companies to re-invent their own version, lack of notion of atomicity, and considering only the users interface.A new alternative modeling approach presented in this paper, Behavioral Pattern Analysis (BPA), is an Event-Oriented approach in which events are considered the primary entities of the world model. The appeal to events is natural. The creation of an Object is an Event. Should we not define the requirements of the model that we are building in terms of events? We believe that the system model should be Event Driven rather than Use Case Driven. Alter all, use comes after creation.If the analyst misinterpreted or neglected some structural or behavioral aspects, the resulting software system may not demonstrate the correct behavior or may ungracefully terminate. The end result might be the loss of opportunities in business systems, serious damages in embedded systems, or the loss of lives in a safety-critical system. The use of events in the BPA Approach provides cohesive integration between the static abstraction (classes) and the dynamic behavior. This integration may partially or totally eliminate the pre-mentioned problems. If the use of the BPA Approach in a safety-critical system may save one life, the significance of this approach is immeasurable.