A formally grounded software specification method

One of the goals of software engineering is to provide what is necessary to write relevant, legible, useful descriptions of the systems to be developed, which will be the basis of successful developments. This goal was addressed both from informal approaches (providing in particular visual notations) and formal ones (providing a formal sound semantic basis). Informal approaches are often driven by a software development method, and, while formal approaches sometimes provide a user method, it is usually aimed at helping to use the proposed formalism when writing a specification. Our goal here is to provide a companion method that helps the user to understand the system to be developed, and to write the corresponding formal specifications. We also aim at supporting visual presentations of formal specifications, so as to "make the best of both formal and informal worlds". We developed this method for the (logical-algebraic) specification languages Casl (Common Algebraic Specifi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JLP
• Authors: Christine Choppy, Gianna Reggio
• Keywords: Dynamic System, Informal Approaches, JLP 2006, Specifications