Formal specification and rapid prototyping: building in quality at the start

Abstract

Formal Methods for Software Engineering, although widely recognised in academe as of potential benefit to industry, have proved difficult to sell, both to industry and to students. Building on a novel teaching approach at Coventry University, we present an integrated approach to formal specification and rapid prototyping that offers a real contribution to building in quality at the front end of the development lifecycle. The significance of formal specification and rapid prototyping for software development are discussed. An introduction is given to the functional programming language Miranda™, the vehicle for our approach. An extended type structure is presented for Miranda, providing an executable specification language based on simple settheoretical structures. We are thus enabled to construct directly executable specifications which serve as rapid prototypes, useful for early requirements analysis and refinement. An explanatory example is presented to show the utility of the approach in building quality systems. Z text is included to show the applicability of the approach to formal specifications expressed in languages such as Z and VDM. The example is further used to describe our HCI-builder tool, which enables the user to quickly produce a functional user interface to her prototype application.