Formal methods and social context in software development

Goguen, Joseph A.; Luqi,

doi:10.1007/3-540-59293-8_187

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…This feature is essential in order to encourage experimentation with the new generation of tools, which often lack acceptance by practitioners because of their high complexities. Our approach exactly meets the description expressed by Goguen and Luqi in [6] for the emerging paradigm of Domain Specific Formal Methods, which requires formal methods to be introduced also on a large or huge grain level, to support programming with whole subroutines, modules and tools as elementary building blocks. This is precisely what METAFrame is designed for.…”

Section: Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 65%

Backtracking-free design planning by automatic synthesis in metaframe

Margaria

Steffen

1998

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

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Abstract. We present an environment supporting the flexible and application-specific construction of design plans, which avoids the insurgence of unsuccessful design plans at design time, and is thus backtracking-free. During a planning phase the collection of all complete, executable design plans is automatically synthesized on the basis of simple constraint-like specifications and the library of available tools. The designer's choice of the best alternative is eased by a user friendly graphical interface and by hypertext support for the generation and management of plans, as illustrated along a user session. Example application field is the generation of design plans in a CAD environment for hardware design. MotivationTo master the complexity and variety of system-level design, flexible environments are required, which efficiently support reuse, 'design in the large' strategies and teamwork. In particular, a rich collection of design tools with different application profiles is needed to allow an application-specific treatment of complex design tasks. We focus here on a concrete application domain, and consider the functionality of CAD Frameworks. Themselves large and complex software systems, frameworks like e.g. NELSIS [17], CADLAB [10], or the Jessi CAD Framework [11] have succeeded to provide VLSI designers with sophisticated and user friendly project management wrt. data and design execution flow. As such, they are widely used, mainly to enforce standard design plans, i.e. predefined successions of activities (e.g. synthesis, verification, simulation, test pattern generation, and -at the physical design level -placement, routing, binding, etc...) which are carried out to get from a circuit specification through many successive design steps to the corresponding layout masks for physical realization on chips.CAD frameworks are good at enforcing a prescribed plan of design activities, but they still offer little support for advanced, application-specific synthesis of design plans involving a flexible use and combination of available tools. Flexibility is however increasingly needed, since projects become larger, tool functionalities

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Section: Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 65%

Backtracking-free design planning by automatic synthesis in metaframe

Margaria

Steffen

1998

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

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“…However, while good practice reduces incompleteness, inconsistency and instability in requirements specifications, is neither feasible nor desirable to eliminate these characteristics altogether [23,24]. For example, a specification could easily be dominated and obscured by axioms defining environmental characteristics to be preserved when a new software system is installed, or axioms defining the social context [13] in which requirements are situated.…”

Section: Formal Specification Of Requirementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The scale of modules can vary enormously. In particular, existing subsystems can be very large indeed [13], and a design may capture only parts of their interfaces.…”

Section: Designs Requirements and Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Formal Software Development

Sherratt

1997

Electronic Workshops in Computing

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Formal nonmonotonic reasoning provides a promising basis for meeting the demands inherent in the incomplete, evolving and inconsistent requirements that characterise large-scale industrial software systems. This paper explores formal reasoning in requirements analysis, design and implementation. It indicates how the notion of provability in maximal consistency logics might be used to extend current logical foundations for existing formal notations for specifying requirements. A number of definitions are then developed, using notions from level default theories to specify preference between consistent subsets of possibly inconsistent requirements, (partial) satisfaction of requirements by programs and by designs, the best subset of the requirements satisfied by a given design, implementation of a design and design improvement. These definitions provide a foundation for some very interesting directions for formal methods research.

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“…Formal models would provide powerful formal engines that support automatic reasoning about important properties, but the supplied VD interfaces lack domain specificity [17,27]. The many proposals, which tried to combine graphical notations with formal models, fail in addressing flexibility, i.e., the real problem: They freeze a fixed semantics and over-constrain the VD notation ( [ 16,24]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Toolbox for Automating Visual Software Engineering

Baresi

Pezzè

2002

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

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Visual diagrammatic (VD) notations have always been widely used in software engineering. Such notations have been used to syntactically represent the structure of software systems, but they usually lack dynamic semantics, and thus provide limited support to software engineers. In contrast, formal models would provide rigorous semantics, but the scarce adaptability to different application domains precluded their large industrial application. Most attempts tried to formalize widely used VD notations by proposing a mapping to a formal model, but they all failed in addressing flexibility, that is, the key factor of the success of VD notations. This paper presents MetaEnv, a toolbox for automating visual software engineering. MetaEnv augments VD notations with customizable dynamic semantics. Traditional meta-CASE tools support flexibility at syntactic level; MetaEnv augments them with semantic flexibility. MetaEnv refers to a framework based on graph grammars and has been experimented as add-on to several commercial and proprietary tools that support syntactic manipulation of VD notations.

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Formal methods and social context in software development

Cited by 18 publications

References 18 publications

Backtracking-free design planning by automatic synthesis in metaframe

Backtracking-free design planning by automatic synthesis in metaframe

Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Formal Software Development

A Toolbox for Automating Visual Software Engineering

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