Refactoring Object-Z Specifications

Abstract

Abstract. Object-Z offers an object-oriented means for structuring formal specifications. We investigate the application of refactoring rules to add and remove structure from such specifications to forge objectoriented designs. This allows us to tractably move from an abstract functional description of a system toward a lower-level design suitable for implementation on an object-oriented platform.

Refactoring Object-Oriented Specifications with Data and Processes

“…al. [Cor04,CCS02] and McComb [MS04,McC04]. Cornèlio defines refactorings and proves their correctness for a refinement-based object-oriented language (ROOL), McComb and Smith use Object-Z.…”

A Static Semantics for Alloy and its Impact in Refactorings

“…McComb [27] investigates refactorings for Object-Z models. He proposes three refactoring rules and show that they are complete in the sense that any Object-Z specification that does not have unbounded recursive constructs, any design may be derived, which represents a refinement of the original specification.…”

A Minimal Set of Refactoring Rules for Object-Z

“…To bridge this gap between specification and implementation, specification refactoring rules have been proposed [7,8,9,11,2,5]. These allow the structure of a specification to be incrementally transformed to represent a given design.…”

“…This rule effectively splits a class's state and operations into two classes -one holding a reference to an instance of the other. It was later adapted to Object-Z by McComb [9] who also introduced the Coalescence rule. This second rule merges two classes together to create a new class that simulates both.…”

“…In [9], McComb also introduced Annealing, which partitions a class state by introducing an instance to a fresh class definition. These four rules are minimal in the sense that they each operate upon one of the four orthogonal aspects of the object-oriented paradigm: no rule (or sequence of rules) can perform the function of any other rule.…”