Second ECOOP Workshop on Precise Behavioral Semantics (with an Emphasis on OO Business Specifications)

Business specifications are essential to describe and understand businesses (and, in particular, business rules) independently of any computing systems used for their possible automation. They have to express this understanding in a clear, precise, and explicit way, in order to act as a common ground between business domain experts and software developers. They also provide the basis for reuse of concepts and constructs ("patterns") common to all - from finance to telecommunications -, or a large number of, businesses, and in doing so save intellectual effort, time and money. Moreover, these patterns substantially ease the elicitation and validation of business specifications during walkthroughs with business customers, and support separation of concerns using viewpoints.Comment: 21 pages, 0 figure

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Correctness of model-based software composition (CMC). Proceedings. ECOOP 2003 Workshop #11 in association with the 17th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Darmstadt, Germany, July 22, 2003

This proceedings contains the contributions to the Workshop on Correctness of Model-based Software Composition, held in conjunction with the 17th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP), Darmstadt, Germany on July 22, 2003. While most events concentrate on realisations of composition on the technological level this workshop aims at closing the gap of ensuring the intended composition result supported by the usage of models. Two important problems in composition are first how to model the different assets (such as components, features or aspects) and second the composition of assets such that consistency and correctness is guaranteed. The first problem has been addressed in the Workshop on Model-based Software Reuse (ECOOP 2002). The latter problem occurs when dealing with, e.g., component interoperability, aspect weaving, feature interaction and (on a more abstract level) traceability between different views or models. One approach to deal with the composition problem is to use models allowing to model the composition. This allows checking the interoperability of the different assets to compose, the correctness of the configuration of assets and predicting properties of the assembled system (especially compliance with user requirements). In case of problem detection suitable resolution algorithms can be applied. 10 reviewed contributions give an overview about current research directions in correctness of model-based software compositions. Results from the discussions during the workshop may be found in the ECOOP 2003 workshop reader to be published by Springer LNCS. The web page of the workshop as well as the contributions of this proceedings may be found at URL: http://ssel.vub.ac.be/workshops/ECOOP2003/ Affiliated to previous ECOOP conferences a related workshop about feature interaction (ECOOP 2001) and an additional about model-based software reuse (ECOOP 2002) have been held. Their contributions are published as technical report No. 2001-14 and as technical report No. 2002-4, respectively, at the Universitaet Karlsruhe, Fakultaet fuer Informatik. URLs: http://www.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/~pulvermu/workshops/ecoop2001/ http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/cgi-bin/psview?document=/ira/2001/14 http://www.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/~pulvermu/workshops/ECOOP2002/ http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/cgi-bin/psview?document=/ira/2002/4 We would like to thank the program committee for their support as well as the authors and participants for their engaged contributions. The Workshop Organisers Ragnhild Van Der Straeten, Andreas Speck, Elke Pulvermueller, Matthias Clauss, Andreas Pleus

Using Alloy to model-check visual design notations

This paper explores the process of validation for the abstract syntax of a graphical notation. We define an unified specification for five of the UML diagrams used by the Discovery Method and, in this document, we illustrate how diagrams can be represented in Alloy and checked against our specification in order to know if these are valid under the Discovery notation.Comment: 8 page

SAVCBS 2003: Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems

These are the proceedings for the SAVCBS 2003 workshop. This workshop was held at ESEC/FSE 2003 in Helsinki Finland in September 2003

Are we there yet? Analyzing architecture description languages for formal analysis, usability, and realizability

Research on Software Architectures has been active since the early nineties, leading to a number of different architecture description languages (ADL). Given their importance in facilitating the communication of crucial system properties to different stakeholders and their analysis early on in the development of a system this is understandable. After all these years one would have hoped that we could point to a handful of ADLs as the clear winners as the languages of choice of practitioners for specifying software system architectures. However it seems that ADLs have still not entered the mainstream. We believe this is so because practitioners find the current offering either too difficult to use or not supporting automated analysis commensurate to the level of effort they require for specifying a system, especially so for complex systems. In this paper we present a comparative analysis of a number of ADLs, both of first generation and more recent ones, against a small set of language properties that we believe are crucial for an ADL that would be easy for practitioners to adopt in their design and development practices. These properties are: formal semantics, usability, and realizability

SAVCBS 2004 Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems: Workshop Proceedings

This is the proceedings of the 2004 SAVCBS workshop. The workshop is concerned with how formal (i.e., mathematical) techniques can be or should be used to establish a suitable foundation for the specification and verification of component-based systems. Component-based systems are a growing concern for the software engineering community. Specification and reasoning techniques are urgently needed to permit composition of systems from components. Component-based specification and verification is also vital for scaling advanced verification techniques such as extended static analysis and model checking to the size of real systems. The workshop considers formalization of both functional and non-functional behavior, such as performance or reliability

SAVCBS 2005 Proceedings: Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems

This workshop is concerned with how formal (i.e., mathematical) techniques can be or should be used to establish a suitable foundation for the specification and verification of component-based systems. Component-based systems are a growing concern for the software engineering community. Specification and reasoning techniques are urgently needed to permit composition of systems from components. Component-based specification and verification is also vital for scaling advanced verification techniques such as extended static analysis and model checking to the size of real systems. The workshop will consider formalization of both functional and non-functional behavior, such as performance or reliability. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners in the areas of component-based software and formal methods to address the open problems in modular specification and verification of systems composed from components. We are interested in bridging the gap between principles and practice. The intent of bringing participants together at the workshop is to help form a community-oriented understanding of the relevant research problems and help steer formal methods research in a direction that will address the problems of component-based systems. For example, researchers in formal methods have only recently begun to study principles of object-oriented software specification and verification, but do not yet have a good handle on how inheritance can be exploited in specification and verification. Other issues are also important in the practice of component-based systems, such as concurrency, mechanization and scalability, performance (time and space), reusability, and understandability. The aim is to brainstorm about these and related topics to understand both the problems involved and how formal techniques may be useful in solving them