Tool support for the transition from Use Case Maps to Message Sequence Charts

In current scenario-driven object-oriented modeling processes, a designer generally progresses from requirements to detailed scenario descriptions (typically defined using some type of interaction diagrams) and ultimately to state machines. Throughout this progression, it is critical to preserve fine-grained traceability links among all the adopted models in order to i) smooth the transition between models of different levels of abstraction; ii) maintain overall semantic consistency and iii) evaluate the coverage of requirements and, possibly, the change impact analysis.Use Case Maps (UCMs) is a high-level scenario specification technique. Encouraging traceability between requirements and interaction diagrams is one of the advantages of the UCM notation. This thesis contributes to this goal by giving an overview of the implementation of a prototype that i) supports the automatic transition from UCMs to interaction diagrams, more specifically, to Message Sequence Charts 2000 (MSCs), ii) captures individual UCM responsibilities as grammars of  messages and iii) allows the visualization of such grammars through MSC inline expressions.