Formal Software Specification Research Articles

The EEC Workshop on Formal Specification of Graphics Software Standards

Abstract This article is a report of the EEC Workshop on the Formal Specification of Graphics Software Standards, held in June 1982. The need for formal specification of graphics software is first examined, then two possible approaches, the programming language approach and the systems approach, are examined. The implications for the certification process are also examined.

Functionally-Oriented System Simulation for computer aided design of software/hardware systems

Functionally Oriented System Simulation (FOSS) is applicable to the design and development of real-time computer systems. FOSS assists the system designer by integrating and verifying a model of the system software and hardware in a simulation. With FOSS, vague preliminary concepts can be refined to evolve formal software specifications and derive hardware requirements for a preferred design solution. FOSS incorporates a formal specification language and a translator (pre-processor) to generate a FORTRAN simulation program which includes computer aided design features. An example is included.

Automated generation of testcase datasets

Software quality enhancement can be achieved in the near term through use of a systematic program testing methodology. The methodology attempts to relate functional software testcases with formal software specifications as a means to achieve correspondence between the software and its specifications. To do this requires generation of appropriate testcase data. Automatic testcase generation is based on a priori knowledge of two forms of internal structure information: a representation of the tree of subschema automatically identified from within each program text, and a representation of the iteration structure of each subschema. This partition of a large program allows for efficient and effective automatic testcase generation using straightforward backtracking techniques. During backtracking a number of simplifying, consolidating, and consistency analyses are applied. The result is either (1) early recognition of the impossibility of a particular program flow, or (2) efficient generation of input variable specifications which cause the testcase to traverse each portion of the required program flow. A number of machine output examples of the backtracking facility are given, and the general effectiveness of the entire process is discussed.