Profile-Based Approach to Support Comprehension of Software Behavior

When reusing an existing software component, the software developer needs to understand the functionality and possible extension points of the component, as well as constraints and rules to be taken into account when using it. In addition to structural rules, the software component may imply interaction rules that must be followed in application development. In this paper we discuss behavioral profiles, given in UML, used to capture and illustrate architecturally significant behavioral rules. The behavioral rules may capture interaction rules to be obeyed when reusing an existing software component. They can also be used to support runtime analysis of existing systems: with a proper tool support, the validity of extracted interaction models can be automatically checked against the behavioral rules given in the profiles. Moreover, the profiles can be used to prune the size of the interaction trace to include only the information relevant from the point of view of the behavioral rules. In this paper we discuss such tool support and demonstrate the usefulness of the approach by applying behavioral profiles to define and illustrate behavioral rules relevant for applications using the graphical editing framework (GEF). Moreover, we analyze a sample GEF application by validating its run-time behaviour with respect to the defined behavioral rules