Visualizing graphical and textual formalisms

ViSta is a tool suite designed to support the requirements specification of reactive systems. It guides the user through the steps necessary for the visualization of statechart diagrams from an informal document. The user first extracts information from a textual document and stores into a set of interactive templates. The information is used by the tool to automatically generate statechart layouts. In this paper we describe how ViSta is augmented with a tool that automatically translates statecharts into Z specifications. The template, statechart and Z representations are inter-related. This ensures consistency between the different representations, and therefore facilitates the verification and validation effort.