Introducing Formal Specification Methods in Industrial Practice

Formal specification methods are not often applied in industrial projects, despite their advantages and the maturity of theories and tools. The scarce familiarity of practitioners with formal notations and the difficulties of their use are main causes of the limited success of formal specification methods. Approaches based on the use of popular front-end notations formally defined with mappings on formal models can solve practical problems. However the absence of flexibility of the mappings proposed so far limits the applicability of such approaches to the few environments that match exactly these solutions. This paper presents an original solution based on formalisms to define mappings from front-end notations to formal models. The proposed framework works with different front-end notations and formal models and supports mappings of analysis results obtained on the formal model to the front-end notation chosen by the practitioners. The approach described in this paper has been valida...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Luciano Baresi, Alessandro Orso, Mauro Pezzè
• Keywords: Formal Model, Formal Specification Methods, Front-end Notation, ICSE 1997, Software Engineering