Visual Specification of Structural and Temporal Properties∗

The UML has become the de-facto standard in software engineering. Due to the visual nature and accessibility of its structural diagrams, it is widely accepted as the tool of choice for structural modeling. However, for specifying structural properties that go beyond cardinalities, the UML only provides a textual specification language, the OCL. For mixed structural and temporal properties, only proprietary combinations of OCL with temporal logic exist today. The intricate nature of both OCL and temporal logic already causes problems for many software engineers. When com-municating with people without a computer science back-ground, e.g. domain experts, employing OCL, any dialect of temporal logic, or a mix of both is usually impracticable. In this paper, we propose a visual language for specifying re-quirements including structural as well as temporal aspects. Based on an extension of Story Patterns, our approach will allow specifying scenarios that contain requirements con-cerning structural dynamics within Fujaba. In addition, we present a scheme for turning a specification into a powerful behavioral monitor, enabling us to verify dynamic structural properties of models at run-time or in a model checker. 1