Composition and refinement for partial object specifications

Abstract

Due to the complexity involved in the specification and development of large, distributed, and object-oriented systems, it is often advocated that individual components should be developed in an aspect-wise manner, where separate descriptions depict various roles, viewpoints, or interfaces of the objects considered. The introduction of such partial specifications requires extra care when reasoning about systems as several specifications of the same object may coexist and lead to overlapping information.In this paper, we consider a compositional approach to system development by means of partial specifications of objects. The approach supports stepwise refinement, which enables global reasoning by local refinement steps in an aspect-oriented specification style. For this purpose, a refinement relation is proposed which is suitable for multiple inheritance of behavior and subclassing in object-oriented languages.

A Knowledge Management Approach for Industrial Model-Based Testing

“…The idea to build partial specifications in the context of formal methods is not new -see (Easterbrook, Callahan, 1997), (Johnsen, Owe, 2002), (Hendrix, Clavel, Meseguer, 2005).…”

“…Approaches described in (Letichevsky, Kapitonova, 2004), (Falcone, Fernandez, Mounier, 2007), (Petrenko, Yevtushenko, 2005) are based on that. Besides in the context of building a full formal model partial specifications are also used to have the opportunities of independent work with different items of a software code, which is used for example when creating models of object-orientated applications (Johnsen, Owe, 2002).…”

“…This paper offers a knowledge management method for model-based testing based on partial specifications and "attached" to the development process that uses it. Partial specifications are actively used in the context of formal methods and are not an unambiguously defined notion -see surveys (Easterbrook, Callahan, 1997), (Johnsen, Owe, 2002), (Hendrix, Clavel, Meseguer, 2005). Here partial specification shall mean formal description of software system developed from model-based testing perspective, and describing not the system as a whole but only some set of system's features, which important for the customer and/or potentially problematic and labour-intensive for testing.…”

Object-Oriented Specification and Open Distributed Systems

“…This section presents a formalism for reasoning about object viewpoints in the setting of ODS, extending the formalism of Section 2. Further details about this work can be found in [28,29,43]. …”