Formal or informal, practical or impractical: towards integrating formal methods with informal practices in software engineering education

Two conflicting schools of thought have been dominating software engineering education. One school stresses on the popular software development methodologies, but horror stories on poorly designed systems are not uncommon. The other school advocates formal methods, but most practitioners regard them as impractical. We recommend that we should bridge the gap between the formal and informal by bringing theory to existing practice. The formalism should be used as a working tool behind popular software development methodologies. Students should not be trained as craftsmen who consider software development as an art and learn only from past mistakes. Nor should they be trained as mathematicians who are more comfortable with theory than applications. Software engineers must be educated as real 'engineers' who are competent with industrial practices as well as the mathematical foundation directly supporting them.postprin

The Use of Prolog in the Modelling and Evaluation of Structure Charts

We summarize our experience in the use of Prolog to model and evaluate structure charts according to standard guidelines in structured design. We discuss how to construct first-cut structure charts automatically from data flow diagrams using transform and transaction analyses, evaluate them using recommended criteria such as coupling, cohesion, morphology and tramp, and improve on the resulting structure charts by means of automatic backtracking