Formal Verification of Annotated Use-Cases

Textual use-cases have been traditionally used at the design stage of development process for describing software functionality from the user’s view. Their advantage is that they can be easily understood by stakeholders and domain experts. However, since use-cases typically rely on a natural language, they cannot be directly subject to a formal verification. In this paper, we present Formal Verification of Annotated Use-Case Models (FOAM). This method features simple user-definable annotations, which are inserted into a use-case to make its semantics more suitable for verification. Subsequently a model-checking tool verifies temporal invariants associated with the annotations. This way, FOAM allows for harnessing the benefits of model-checking while still keeping the use-cases understandable for non-experts. This work was partially supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic project P103/11/1489 and by the Charles University institutional funding SVV-2012-265312. D3S, Technical Report no. D3S-TR-2012-02 CONTENTS