IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Information systems ranging over wide areas show properties that must be carefully analyzed and designed in order to meet the needs of the customers. Thus the development of such information systems is to be guided by software engineering methods that address problems like distribution of data and processes, communication aspects and fault tolerance. This paper shows the basic modeling concepts an... View full abstract»

Formal methods have had little impact on software engineering practice, despite the fact that most software engineering practitioners readily acknowledge the potential benefits to be gained from the mathematical modeling involved. One reason is that existing modeling techniques tend not to address basic software engineering concerns. In particular, while considerable attention has been paid to the... View full abstract»

Automated behavior analysis is a valuable technique in the development and maintenance of distributed systems. In this paper, we present a tractable dataflow analysis technique for the detection of unreachable states and actions in distributed systems. The technique follows an approximate approach described by Reif and Smolka, but delivers a more accurate result in assessing unreachable states and... View full abstract»

ASTRAL is a formal specification language for real-time systems. It is intended to support formal software development, and therefore has been formally defined. This paper focuses on how to formally prove the mathematical correctness of ASTRAL specifications. ASTRAL is provided with structuring mechanisms that allow one to build modularized specifications of complex systems with layering. In this ... View full abstract»

The logic presented in a previous paper, see ibid., vol. 19, no.4, p.366-78 (1993) for processes that communicate using flush channels is inadequate for reasoning about processes that send multiple identical messages along a channel. A modification to the logic and proof system that remedies this deficiency is described herein View full abstract»

The aim of a cooperative system is to coordinate and support group activities. Cooperative Systems Design Language (CSDL) is an experimental language designed to support the development of cooperative systems from specification to implementation. In CSDL, a system is defined as a collection of reusable entities implementing floor control disciplines and shared workspaces. CSDL tries to address the... View full abstract»

The development of most large and complex systems necessarily involves many people-each with their own perspectives on the system defined by their knowledge, responsibilities, and commitments. To address this we have advocated distributed development of specifications from multiple perspectives. However, this leads to problems of identifying and handling inconsistencies between such perspectives. ... View full abstract»

An empirical study of methods for representing reusable software components is described. Thirty-five subjects searched for reusable components in a database of UNIX tools using four different representation methods: attribute-value, enumerated, faceted, and keyword. The study used Proteus, a reuse library system that supports multiple representation methods. Searching effectiveness was measured w... View full abstract»

How should iterators be abstracted and encapsulated in modern imperative languages? We consider the combined impact of several factors on this question: the need for a common interface model for user defined iterator abstractions, the importance of formal methods in specifying such a model, and problems involved in modular correctness proofs of iterator implementations and clients. A series of ite... View full abstract»

We examine the functional cohesion of procedures using a data slice abstraction. Our analysis identifies the data tokens that lie on more than one slice as the “glue” that binds separate components together. Cohesion is measured in terms of the relative number of glue tokens, tokens that lie on more than one data slice, and super-glue tokens, tokens that lie on all data slices in a pro... View full abstract»

We classify standby redundancy design space in process-control programs into the following three categories: cold standby, warm standby, and hot standby. Design parameters of warm standby are identified and the reliability of a system using warm standby is evaluated and compared with that of hot standby. Our analysis indicates that the warm standby scheme is particularly suitable for long-lived un... View full abstract»