Considerate Reasoning and the Composite Design Pattern

We propose Considerate Reasoning, a novel specification and verification technique based on object invariants. This technique supports succinct specifications of implementations which follow the pattern of breaking properties of other objects and then notifying them appropriately. It allows the specification to be concerned only with the properties directly relevant to the current method call, with no need to explicitly mention the concerns of subcalls. In this way, the specification reflects the division of responsibility present in the implementation, and reflects what we regard as the natural argument behind the design. We specify and prove the well-known Composite design pattern using Considerate Reasoning. We show how to encode our approach in Boogie2. The resulting specification verifies automatically within a few seconds; no manual guidance is required beyond the careful representation of the invariants themselves.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: VMCAI
• Authors: Alexander J. Summers, Sophia Drossopoulou
• Keywords: Composite Design Pattern, Considerate Reasoning, Software Engineering, Specification Verifies, VMCAI 2010