Automated Software Specification and Design Using the SOFL Formal Engineering Method

The Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language (SOFL) offers a formal engineering method for effectively incorporating formal specifications into system architectures in order to improve the quality of software design, but faces a challenge in tool support. This paper describes the techniques for building an effective software tool to support the construction of design specifications using SOFL. The techniques include (1) enforcing error detection and prevention in specification construction, (2) offering an "intelligent" and systematic guidance for decomposing operations and for completing specifications, and (3) supplying inter-related navigation among different representations of a SOFL specification. The tool has been applied in our several projects.