Integrating Animation-Based Inspection Into Formal Design Specification Construction for Reliable Software Systems

Abstract

Software design has been well recognized as an important means to achieve high reliability, and formal specification can help enhance the quality of design. However, communications between the designer and the user can become difficult via formal specifications due to the potentially complex mathematical expressions in the specification. This difficulty may lead to the situation where the user may not be closely involved in the process of constructing the specification for quality assurance. To allow formal specification to play more effective roles in software design, we put forward a new approach to deal with this problem in this paper. The approach is characterized by integrating specification animation-based inspection into the process of constructing formal design specifications. We discuss the underlying principle of the approach by explaining how specification animation is utilized as a reading technique for inspection to validate, and then evolve, the current specification towards a satisfactory one. We describe a prototype software tool for the method, and present a case study to show how the method supported by the tool works in practice.

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Meeduse: A Tool to Build and Run Proved DSLs

“…The result is an automatic visual animation directly showed in the MDE tools that are synchronised with the model resource. Several formal tools provide graphic animation and visualization techniques [11,19,22], which is intended to favour the communication between a formal methods engineer and the domain expert by using domain-specific visualizations. The contribution of Meeduse in comparison with these techniques is that the input model is provided by the domain expert using a dedicated language.…”