Kevin Lano

Specification in B: An Introduction Using the B Toolkit

Offers a practical introduction to the B specification language and method, an approach to the development of high-quality software using rigorous CASE techniques. Examples of all development life-cycle stages are given in the work, including animation, proof, design and code generation in C. Two case studies and excercises with solutions are provided.

A compendium of formal techniques for software maintenance

Software maintenance is an important area in practical software engineering that has been largely overlooked by many theoretical computer scientists. This paper gives an overview of formal techniques developed recently to aid the software maintenance process, and in particular reverse engineering and re-engineering. In the future, it is suggested that specifications, rather than programs, should be maintained. The described work provides a mathematical basis for a large collaborative project, which has also been investigating many other aspects of software maintenance.

Formal specifications in software maintenance: from code to Z++ and back again

Abstract The paper presents a number of techniques that have been developed as components of the software maintenance process as part of the ESPRIT REDO project. These techniques are all based on formal methods, and the work described has provided the mathematical underpinning to a large collaborative project that has been investigating various aspects of software maintenance. The focus of the project has been on reverse engineering, and methods for this part of the maintenance process are reported on here, along with techniques for subsequent re-engineering. A proposal for specification-oriented software maintenance is presented, in which specifications in an object-oriented extension of the formal notation Z are maintained in step with the corresponding programs.

Integrating formal and structured methods in reverse-engineering

The issue of the interaction between structured and formal notations in reverse-engineering and maintenance is discussed, and a process which uses both forms of representation to support application understanding, evaluation, assessment, redesign, and reengineering is described. This process is supported by prototype tools implemented on the REDO toolkit and repository for reverse-engineering.<<ETX>>

Reuse and Adaptation of Z Specifications

This paper discusses the reuse and adaptation of specifications in Z and object oriented Z, and provides techniques based on a calculus of refinements and on measures of specification design quality, which attempt to address these issues. This calculus will form the basis of a proposal to extend the logic W for standard Z [40] to a reasoning formalism suitable for proving relationships between specifications at a global level. Comparisons with the facilities offered by object oriented specification languages, and with the B abstract machine notation are given. Examples from industrial case studies of the applications of these techniques are also provided.

The Impact of Integrating Agile Software Development and Model-Driven Development: A Comparative Case Study

Agile and Model-Driven Development integration (Agile MDD) is of significant interest to researchers who want to leverage the best of both worlds. Currently, there is no clear evidence or proof for the real impact of such integration. As a first step in this direction, this paper reports an empirical investigation on the impact of integrating Agile and Model-Driven Development on the quality of software systems. To this end, we developed a financial application using Agile MDD, which is further contrasted with three other independent versions of the same application developed using different approaches: Agile method, MDD method, and traditional (manually-coded) method, respectively. We also compared the functionality of the systems and a variety of technical debt metrics measuring the quality of the code and its design. Based on the case study results, we have found that the use of Agile MDD shows some improvements in the product quality and efficiency.