Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5.4 Animation
Animation is a well-established technique that is used to check for compilation of
the actual requirements of stakeholders with the given software specifications. It
shows an actual behaviour of a system through execution of a formal model in the
form of animation. An executable model is based on the software specifications;
the software behaviour is simulated by executing that model; the simulation is vi-
sualised on a textual or graphical model representation by highlighting the current
model element being executed. Animation thus allows a software engineer to dis-
cover the presence of problems, not their absence. Several kinds of benefits and
limitations of animation [ 26 , 47 ] are given as follows:
5.4.1 Benefits of Animation
Animation has major benefits of validating a system model through earlier de-
tection and correcting the problems for improving the quality of requirements
specification.
Animation provides behaviour of a system model, which can be used to vali-
date the internal mechanism of the system model by inspection, and it helps to
clarify requirements using animated interaction with the specification when re-
quirements are unclear.
In this prototyping technique, all kinds of tools have their own automatic transla-
tion tools, which is used for making formal specifications executable.
Execution of the formal model in the form of animation helps inspection and
formal reasoning as a means of validation for better understanding of the given
system. Quite often the stakeholders are not sure about what they exactly want or
how to describe their ideas. This technique helps to them to discover real require-
ments.
5.4.2 Limitations of Animation
Animation techniques are not for exhaustive testing. In a complex system, there
are numerous states, which is impossible to test due to the problem of “states
explosion”.
Animation tools are not always stakeholder-friendly due to specific notations of
the supported modelling languages, which are not easily understandable by non-
technical stakeholders and might be difficult to read and interpret such anima-
tions.
As long as the requirements engineering process is in progress, the requirements
engineers have to handle ambiguous and incomplete requirements. Nevertheless,
in that case requirements engineers are obliged to define a semantically correct
and formal system model in order to run animation.
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