OpenJML: Software verification for Java 7 using JML, OpenJDK, and Eclipse

OpenJML is a tool for checking code and specifications of Java programs. We describe our experience building the tool on the foundation of JML, OpenJDK and Eclipse, as well as on many advances in specification-based software verification. The implementation demonstrates the value of integrating specification tools directly in the software development IDE and in automating as many tasks as possible. The tool, though still in progress, has now been used for several college-level courses on software specification and verification and for small-scale studies on existing Java programs.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2014, arXiv:1404.578

Software (Re-)Engineering with PSF III: an IDE for PSF

We describe the design of an integrated development environment (IDE) for PSF. In the software engineering process we used process algebra in the form of PSF for the specification of the architecture of the IDE. This specification is refined to a PSF specification of the IDE system as a ToolBus application, by applying vertical and horizontal implementation techniques. We implemented the various tools as specified and connected them with a ToolBus script extracted from the system specification

Flight software requirements and design support system

The desirability and feasibility of computer-augmented support for the pre-implementation activities occurring during the development of flight control software was investigated. The specific topics to be investigated were the capabilities to be included in a pre-implementation support system for flight control software system development, and the specification of a preliminary design for such a system. Further, the pre-implementation support system was to be characterized and specified under the constraints that it: (1) support both description and assessment of flight control software requirements definitions and design specification; (2) account for known software description and assessment techniques; (3) be compatible with existing and planned NASA flight control software development support system; and (4) does not impose, but may encourage, specific development technologies. An overview of the results is given

Modeling the dialogue aspects of an information system.

In this paper we investigate techniques offered by current object-oriented development methods for the specification of the user-system dialogue aspect of a software system. Current development methods do not give very extensive guidelines on how to model this aspect and the available techniques need some refinement and elaboration to fit this particular task in the software specification process. The paper first compares a number of approaches. The common elements of these approaches are summarized and further developed into one comprehensive set of techniques that addresses the needs of functional requirements analysis.

The Synonym management process in SAREL

The specification phase is one of the most important and least supported parts of the software development process. The SAREL system has been conceived as a knowledge-based tool to improve the specification phase. The purpose of SAREL (Assistance System for Writing Software Specifications in Natural Language) is to assist engineers in the creation of software specifications written in Natural Language (NL). These documents are divided into several parts. We can distinguish the Introduction and the Overall Description as parts that should be used in the Knowledge Base construction. The information contained in the Specific Requirements Section corresponds to the information represented in the Requirements Base. In order to obtain high-quality software requirements specification the writing norms that define the linguistic restrictions required and the software engineering constraints related to the quality factors have been taken into account. One of the controls performed is the lexical analysis that verifies the words belong to the application domain lexicon which consists of the Required and the Extended lexicon. In this sense a synonym management process is needed in order to get a quality software specification. The aim of this paper is to present the synonym management process performed during the Knowledge Base construction. Such process makes use of the Spanish Wordnet developed inside the Eurowordnet project. This process generates both the Required lexicon and the Extended lexicon that will be used during the Requirements Base construction.Postprint (published version

A UML-based static verification framework for security

Secure software engineering is a new research area that has been proposed to address security issues during the development of software systems. This new area of research advocates that security characteristics should be considered from the early stages of the software development life cycle and should not be added as another layer in the system on an ad-hoc basis after the system is built. In this paper, we describe a UML-based Static Verification Framework (USVF) to support the design and verification of secure software systems in early stages of the software development life-cycle taking into consideration security and general requirements of the software system. USVF performs static verification on UML models consisting of UML class and state machine diagrams extended by an action language. We present an operational semantics of UML models, define a property specification language designed to reason about temporal and general properties of UML state machines using the semantic domains of the former, and implement the model checking process by translating models and properties into Promela, the input language of the SPIN model checker. We show that the methodology can be applied to the verification of security properties by representing the main aspects of security, namely availability, integrity and confidentiality, in the USVF property specification language

Formal specification techniques in object-oriented analysis: a comparative view.

During the last decade, object orientation has been advanced as a promising paradigm for software construction. In addition several authors have advocated the use of formal specification techniques during software development. Formal methods enable reasoning (in a mathematical sense) about properties of programs and systems. It is clear that also object oriented software development can benefit from the use of formal techniques.But although the object oriented analysis (OOA) methods claim to provide the necessary concepts and tools to improve the quality of software development, they are in general informal. This is surprising as the modeling techniques used in OOA have a high potential for formalization. The purpose of this study is to compare the specification techniques used in current OOA-methods. In particular, the degree of formality provided by most of the methods is discussed and evaluated from a quality control perspective.Software; Methods; Programs; Systems; Studies; Quality control;