Exploring the software development trilogy

Software development is concerned with more than just generation of code; the program must have the desired properties, and these must be demonstrated via suitable tests and correctness arguments. One way of viewing these aspects is to group them into programs, properties, and data. When represented as vertices in a triangle, the edges represent processes to produce one element from another. The research reported in this article aims at practical methods for automatic test generation by restricting the use of both predicate logic and programming constructs. It promises to eventually result in practical domain-specific programming languages, with a significant boost in both quality and productivity.