The development and deployment of formal methods in the UK

UK researchers have made major contributions to the technical ideas underpinning formal approaches to the specification and development of computer systems. Perhaps as a consequence of this, some of the significant attempts to deploy theoretical ideas into practical environments have taken place in the UK. The authors of this paper have been involved in formal methods for many years and both have tracked a significant proportion of the whole story. This paper both lists key ideas and indicates where attempts were made to use the ideas in practice. Not all of these deployment stories have been a complete success and an attempt is made to tease out lessons that influence the probability of long-term impact.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Using formal methods to support testing

Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing

An Object Based Approach Towards the Automation of Office Procedures Using Intelligent Messages

Office support systems are used to automate routine office tasks. Since office tasks often require the cooperation of several office workers who may be physically dispersed, it is important to develop advanced communication systems that better facilitate collaborative and cooperative office work among office workers. In this thesis, we propose an approach to the construction of advanced communication systems in which messages are represented as objects that are “intelligent” and “active” and can therefore perform certain activities (such as interacting with various entities to collect data) and decisions (such as dynamically deciding which user to go to next) on their own. The system is called Intelligent Message System IMS. The major components of IMS are as follows: Intelligent Message Objects (IMO). These objects represent the actual intelligent objects of the system. System Mail Manager (SMM) which provides the users an interface to create, send, receive, and maintain IMOs. Intelligent Message Script Language (IMSL) is a language used to program IMOs. Office workers can delegate the responsibility for certain routine office tasks to an IMO and can therefore spend their time on more important activities. Thus, in addition to its theoretical contributions, this thesis provides a framework for building an advanced computer-based message system that increases productivity in an office environment. Each component of the IMS is explained in detail in the thesis. A variation of BNF formalism is used to define the syntax of IMSL while VDM is used to formally define the semantics of major functions of intelligent message objects. A number of examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the IMS in automation of certain office tasks

A survey of software development practices in the New Zealand software industry

We report on the software development techniques used in the New Zealand software industry, paying particular attention to requirements gathering. We surveyed a selection of software companies with a general questionnaire and then conducted in-depth interviews with four companies. Our results show a wide variety in the kinds of companies undertaking software development, employing a wide range of software development techniques. Although our data are not sufficiently detailed to draw statistically significant conclusions, it appears that larger software development groups typically have more well-defined software development processes, spend proportionally more time on requirements gathering, and follow more rigorous testing regimes

7e Nederlandse testdag, Eindhoven, 8 November 2001 : proceedings

These are the proceedings of the seventh edition of the Nederlandse Testdag (a.k.a. Dutch Testing Day), held on November 8, 2001 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The increase in the complexity of software and hardware systems was the predominant concern in the software design of the last decades. This increase is still going on today. and mastering this complexity is possible, only by investigating, discussing and evaluating methods and techniques for testing such systems. The Nederlandse Testdag serves as a forum in which researchers from the industry and the academia discuss and present their latest experiences and theories in the area of testing. The initiative for organising the Nederlandse Testdag is, and has always been, the result of the combined efforts of the Dutch academia and the industry. The Nederlandse Testdag is an annual event which was first held in 1995. This year's edition again consists of one invited presentation by Jens Grabowski, on ITCN-3. and six regular presentations, both from the academia and from the industry. The presentations capture a broad field of the entire testing spectrum. In the presentation by Martin Gijsen (CMG), test automation for Graphical User Interface (GUI), dedicated and embedded systems according to the TestFrame methodology is explained. Klaas Mateboer (Collis) presents the test-tool Conclusion. René de Vries (University of Twente) reports on specification testing in practice and illustrates this by means of an example. In the presentation by Loe Feijs (Eindhoven University of Technology), testing is related to game-theory. Marcel Verhoef (Chess) and Bertil Oving (NLR) present their experiences using real-time simulation, UML and VDM to obtain more reliable spacecraft avionics. Finally, Ben van Buitenen (Baan), provides an insight in service pack testing: how to efficiently test customised software components and packages. The organisation of the Nederlandse Testdag is grateful for the sponsorship it received from the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Eindhoven Embedded Systems Institute, and the financial support from Dutch Research School IPA. We are very much indebted to CMG and Telelogic's willingness to sponsor this event financially. Over the years, both companies have profiled themselves as companies investing both time and resources in advancing the current state in testing. Finally, the organisation thanks Marcella de Rooij and EIize Russell for their organisational assistance

On the testability of SDL specifications

The problem of testing from an SDL specification is often complicated by the presence of infeasible paths. This paper introduces an approach for transforming a class of SDL specification in order to eliminate or reduce the infeasible path problem. This approach is divided into two phases in order to aid generality. First the SDL specification is rewritten to create a normal form extended finite state machine (NF-EFSM). This NF-EFSM is then expanded in order to produce a state machine in which the test criterion may be satisfied using paths that are known to be feasible. The expansion process is guaranteed to terminate. Where the expansion process may lead to an excessively large state machine, this process may be terminated early and feasible paths added. The approach is illustrated through being applied to the Initiator process of the Inres protocol

7e Nederlandse testdag, Eindhoven, 8 November 2001 : proceedings

These are the proceedings of the seventh edition of the Nederlandse Testdag (a.k.a. Dutch Testing Day), held on November 8, 2001 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The increase in the complexity of software and hardware systems was the predominant concern in the software design of the last decades. This increase is still going on today. and mastering this complexity is possible, only by investigating, discussing and evaluating methods and techniques for testing such systems. The Nederlandse Testdag serves as a forum in which researchers from the industry and the academia discuss and present their latest experiences and theories in the area of testing. The initiative for organising the Nederlandse Testdag is, and has always been, the result of the combined efforts of the Dutch academia and the industry. The Nederlandse Testdag is an annual event which was first held in 1995. This year's edition again consists of one invited presentation by Jens Grabowski, on ITCN-3. and six regular presentations, both from the academia and from the industry. The presentations capture a broad field of the entire testing spectrum. In the presentation by Martin Gijsen (CMG), test automation for Graphical User Interface (GUI), dedicated and embedded systems according to the TestFrame methodology is explained. Klaas Mateboer (Collis) presents the test-tool Conclusion. René de Vries (University of Twente) reports on specification testing in practice and illustrates this by means of an example. In the presentation by Loe Feijs (Eindhoven University of Technology), testing is related to game-theory. Marcel Verhoef (Chess) and Bertil Oving (NLR) present their experiences using real-time simulation, UML and VDM to obtain more reliable spacecraft avionics. Finally, Ben van Buitenen (Baan), provides an insight in service pack testing: how to efficiently test customised software components and packages. The organisation of the Nederlandse Testdag is grateful for the sponsorship it received from the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Eindhoven Embedded Systems Institute, and the financial support from Dutch Research School IPA. We are very much indebted to CMG and Telelogic's willingness to sponsor this event financially. Over the years, both companies have profiled themselves as companies investing both time and resources in advancing the current state in testing. Finally, the organisation thanks Marcella de Rooij and EIize Russell for their organisational assistance

System-Level Energy-Aware Design of Cyber-Physical Systems

In this technical report we present the work conducted during the first part of the PhD thesis “System-Level Energy-Aware Design of Cyber-Physical Systems”. We present the application of modelling techniques and methodologies to study energy consumption during the design and implementation of cyber-physical systems. This study is made from the electro-mechanical and computation angle. Additionally we present a setup that allows the combination of abstract models with hardware and software preliminary realizations. This allows a stepwise model to implementation transformation and improved model accuracy. Some of these techniques have been applied to the case study e-Stocking and others have been studied with more simple experimental setups.In addition to the scientific content, we also present a description of the envisioned future work and the plans that will lead to completion of this PhD thesis by April 2015

Specifying the Behavior of UML Collaborations Using Object-Z

UML is a standard modelling language that is able to specify a wide range of object-oriented concepts. Among them, we have collaborations, that serve to realise use cases, a powerful abstraction concept. The behaviour part of a collaboration is rendered using collaboration diagrams. However, the lack of formalisation compromises the precision of the specification. By using formal description techniques, such as Object-Z, we can reason about the requirements and identify ambiguities and inconsistencies earlier in the development process. In general, we can say that formalisation helps obtaining a more reliable system. Our aim is to formalise collaborations Object-Z class schemas. This is accomplished by proposing an integrated formal process

Formal Specification of QoS Negotiation in ODP System

The future of Open Distributed Processing systems (ODP) will see an increasing of components number, these components are sharing resources. In general, these resources are offering some kind of services. Due to the huge number of components, it is very difficult to offer the optimum Quality of service (QoS). This encourages us to develop a model for QoS negotiation process to optimize the QoS in an ODP system. In such system, there is a High risk of software or hardware failure. To ensure good performance of a system based on our model, we develop it using a formal method. In our case, we will use Event-B to get in the end of our development a system correct by construction