Animation for validation of business system specifications

Business system engineers, responding to changes in the market place, are faced with the challenge of building increasingly complex and varied systems. Formal approaches and modeling tools, incorporated in the CASE technology, are used to aid the requirements engineering (RE) activity, which leads to a high level specification of business systems. The validation of these specifications is a very delicate activity since it requires heavy stakeholder involvement and a consensus between stakeholders and analysts, who have quite different backgrounds and concerns. The validation approach that is put forward in the paper, uses a set of conceptual modeling formalisms and a set of formal scenarios, together with a mechanism to automatically generate them. In addition, the approach makes use of animation techniques in order to visualize the scenarios. A system that implements the approach is also described