Validation And Verification Of Formal Specifications In Object Oriented Software Engineering

The use of formal specifications allows for a software system to be defined with stringent mathematical semantics and syntax via such tools as propositional calculus and set theory. There are many perceived benefits garnered from formal specifications, such as a thorough and in-depth understanding of the domain and system being specified and a reduction in user requirement ambiguity. Probably the greatest benefit of formal specifications, and that which is least capitalized upon, is that mathematical proof procedures can be used to test and prove internal consistency and syntactic correctness in an effort to ensure comprehensive validation and verification (V

Software systems play an increasingly important role in modern societies. Smart cards for personal identi?cation, e-banking, software-controlled me- cal tools, airbags in cars, and autopilots for aircraft control are only some examples that illustrate how everyday life depends on the good behavior of software. Consequently, techniques and methods for the development of hi- quality, dependable software systems are a central research topic in computer science. A fundamental approach to this area is to use formal speci?cation and veri?cation. Speci?cation languages allow one to describe the crucial p- perties of software systems in an abstract, mathematically precise, and implementation-independent way. By formal veri?cation, one can then prove that an implementation really has the desired, speci?ed properties. Although this formal methods approach has been a research topic for more than 30 years, its practical success is still restricted to domains in which devel- ment costs are of minor importance. Two aspects are crucial to widen the application area of formal methods: – Formal speci?cation techniques have to be smoothly integrated into the software and program development process. – The techniques have to be applicable to reusable software components. This way, the quality gain can be exploited for more than one system, thereby justifying the higher development costs. Starting from these considerations, Peter Muller ̈ has developed new te- niques for the formal speci?cation and veri?cation of object-oriented so- ware. The speci?cation techniques are declarative and implementati- independent. They can be used for object-oriented design and programming.

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International Conference on Formal Verification of Object-Oriented Software, FoVeOOS 2011, held in Turin, Italy, in October 2011 – organised by COST Action IC0701. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. Formal software verification has outgrown the area of academic case studies, and industry is showing serious interest. The logical next goal is the verification of industrial software products. Most programming languages used in industrial practice are object-oriented, e.g. Java, C++, or C#. FoVeOOS 2011 aimed to foster collaboration and interactions among researchers in this area.

"This book explores different applications in V & V that spawn many areas of software development -including real time applications- where V & V techniques are required, providing in all cases examples of the applications"--Provided by publisher.

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International Conference on Formal Verification of Object-Oriented Software, FoVeOOS 2010, held in Paris, France, in June 2010 - organised by COST Action IC0701. The 11 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. Formal software verification has outgrown the area of academic case studies, and industry is showing serious interest. The logical next goal is the verification of industrial software products. Most programming languages used in industrial practice are object-oriented, e.g. Java, C++, or C#. FoVeOOS 2010 aimed to foster collaboration and interactions among researchers in this area.

At the dawn of the 21st century and the information age, communication and c- puting power are becoming ever increasingly available, virtually pervading almost every aspect of modern socio-economical interactions. Consequently, the potential for realizing a signi?cantly greater number of technology-mediated activities has emerged. Indeed, many of our modern activity ?elds are heavily dependant upon various underlying systems and software-intensive platforms. Such technologies are commonly used in everyday activities such as commuting, traf?c control and m- agement, mobile computing, navigation, mobile communication. Thus, the correct function of the forenamed computing systems becomes a major concern. This is all the more important since, in spite of the numerous updates, patches and ?rmware revisions being constantly issued, newly discovered logical bugs in a wide range of modern software platforms (e. g. , operating systems) and software-intensive systems (e. g. , embedded systems) are just as frequently being reported. In addition, many of today’s products and services are presently being deployed in a highly competitive environment wherein a product or service is succeeding in most of the cases thanks to its quality to price ratio for a given set of features. Accordingly, a number of critical aspects have to be considered, such as the ab- ity to pack as many features as needed in a given product or service while c- currently maintaining high quality, reasonable price, and short time -to- market.

The ultimate goal of program verification is not the theory behind the tools or the tools themselves, but the application of the theory and tools in the software engineering process. Our society relies on the correctness of a vast and growing amount of software. Improving the software engineering process is an important, long-term goal with many steps. Two of those steps are the KeY tool and this KeY book.

Addressing various aspects of object-oriented software techniques with respect to their impact on testing, this text argues that the testing of object-oriented software is not restricted to a single phase of software development. The book concentrates heavily on the testing of classes and of components or sub-systems, and a major part is devoted to this subject. C++ is used throughout this book that is intended for software practitioners, managers, researchers, students, or anyone interested in object-oriented technology and its impacts throughout the software engineering life-cycle.

This text presents techniques for the precise description of software or systems using the object-oriented formal specification language, Object Z. It includes numerous and varied case studies to illustrate the techniques and language of object-oriented formal specification and illustrates the key role of formal specification in formal verification and in implementation. Although primarily intended for safety-critical or complex software development, formal specification also has wide application in hardware or general system description.