A Creative Approach to Reducing Ambiguity in Scenario-based Software Architecture Analysis

In software engineering, a scenario describes an anticipated usage of a software system. As scenarios are useful to understand the requirements and functionalities of a software system, the scenario-based analysis is widely used in various tasks, especially in the design stage of software architectures. Although researchers have proposed various scenario-based approaches to analyse software architecture, there are still limitations in this research field, and a key limitation is that scenarios are typically not formally defined and thus may contain ambiguities. As these ambiguities may lead to defects, it is desirable to reduce them as many as possible. In order to reduce ambiguity in scenario-based software architecture analysis, this paper introduces a creative computing approach to scenario-based software requirements analysis. Our work expands this idea in three directions. Firstly, we extend an architecture description language (ADL)-based language – Breeze/ADL to model the software architecture. Secondly, we use a creative rule – combinational rule (CR) to combine the vector clock algorithm for reducing the ambiguities in modelling scenarios. Then, another creative rule – transformational rule (TR) is employed to help to transform our Breeze/ADL model to a popular model – unified modelling language (UML) model. We implement our approach as a plugin of Breeze, and illustrate a running example of modelling a poetry to music system in our case study. Our results show the proposed creative approach is able to reduce ambiguities of the software architecture in practice.