Structured Behavioral Programming Idioms

Behavioral Programming (BP) is a modelling and programming technique proposed for specifying and for implementing complex reactive systems. While effective, we report on a weakness that stems from the verbosity and from the complexity of the programming constructs in BP. Our analysis, described in this paper, shows that developers who work with BP use specific patterns that allow them to control the complexity of their specification. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is a set of specification constructs that represent those patterns. We report on the design of the new idioms, termed structured constructs for behavioral programming and on an empirical evaluation in a controlled experiment that proved their effectiveness. In particular, the experiment examined the comprehensibility differences between behavioral specifications with non-structured BP programming idioms and with the structured ones. The results indicate that the new structures improve the comprehension of the behavioral specification.