Towards a theory of conceptual design for software

Concepts are the building blocks of software systems. They are not just subjective mental constructs, but are objective features of a system's design: increments of functionality that were consciously introduced by a designer to serve particular purposes. This essay argues for viewing the design of software in terms of concepts, with their invention (or adoption) and refinement as the central activity of software design. A family of products can be characterized by arranging concepts in a dependence graph from which coherent concept subsets can be extracted. Just as bugs can be found in the code of a function prior to testing by reviewing the programmer's argument for its correctness, so flaws can be found in a software design by reviewing an argument by the designer. This argument consists of providing, for each concept, a single compelling purpose, and demonstrating how the concept fulfills the purpose with an archetypal scenario called an 'operational principle'. Some simple conditions (primarily in the relationship between concepts and their purposes) can then be applied to reveal flaws in the conceptual design.SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC

Formal Specification: a Roadmap

Formal specifications have been a focus of software engineering research for many years and have been applied in a wide variety of settings. Their industrial use is still limited but has been steadily growing. After recalling the essence, role, usage, and pitfalls of formal specification, the paper reviews the main specification paradigms to date and discuss their evaluation criteria. It then provides a brief assessment of the current strengths and weaknesses of today's formal specification technology. This provides a basis for formulating a number of requirements for formal specification to become a core software engineering activity in the future

Techniques de construction de programmes parallèles fortement corrects

Doctorat en Sciencesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Goal-oriented requirements enginering: a roundtrip from research to practice [enginering read engineering]

The software industry is more than ever facing the challenge of delivering WYGIWYW software (what you get is what you want). A well-structured document specifying adequate, complete, consistent, precise, and measurable requirements is a critical prerequisite for such software. Goals have been recognized to be among the driving forces for requirements elicitation, elaboration, organization, analysis, negotiation, documentation, and evolution. Growing experience with goal-oriented requirements engineering suggests synergistic links between research in this area and good practice. We discuss one journey along this road from influencing ideas and research results to tool developments to good practice in industrial projects. On the way, we discuss some lessons learnt, obstacles to technology transfer, and challenges for better requirements engineering research and practice.Anglai