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A Family of Mathematical Methods for Professional Software Documentation

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Integrated Formal Methods (IFM 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 3771))

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Abstract

The movement to integrate mathematically based software development methods is a predictable response to the fact that none of the many methods available seems sufficient to do the whole job (whatever that may be) on its own. This talk argues that integrating separately developed methods is not the most fruitful possible approach. Instead we propose a family of methods, based on a common model, designed to be complementary and mutually supportive.

The method family being developed at the Software Quality Research Lab at the University of Limerick is characterised by two major decisions:

– Software developers must prepare and maintain a set of documents whose content (not format) is specified by the relational model presented in [3].

– The relations are represented using mathematical expressions in tabular form. [5].

This talk will motivate these decisions, describe the model, illustrate the concept of tabular expressions, and discuss the uses of such documents in software development.

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References

  1. Heninger, K., Kallander, J., Parnas, D.L., Shore, J.: Software Requirements for the A-7E Aircraft. NRL Report 3876, 523 pgs (November 1978)

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  2. Parnas, D.L.: Predicate Logic for Software Engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 19(9), 856–862 (1993); Reprinted as Chapter 3 in [6]

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  3. Parnas, D.L., Madey, J.: Functional Documentation for Computer Systems Engineering. Science of Computer Programming 25(1), 41–61 (1995)

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  4. Parnas, D.L.: Inspection of Safety Critical Software using Function Tables. In: Proceedings of IFIP World Congress 1994, August 1994, vol. III, pp. 270–277 (1994), Also Ch. 19 in [6]

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  5. Janicki, R., Parnas, D.L., Zucker, J.: Tabular Representations in Relational Documents. In: Brink, C., Schmidt, G. (eds.) Relational Methods in Computer Science,  Ch. 12, pp. 184–196. Springer, Heidelberg (1997), ISBN 3-211-82971-7. Reprinted as Chapter 4 in [6]

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  6. Hoffman, D.M., Weiss, D.M. (eds.): Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L. Parnas, p. 664. Addison-Wesley, Reading (2001), ISBN 0-201-70369-6

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Parnas, D.L. (2005). A Family of Mathematical Methods for Professional Software Documentation. In: Romijn, J., Smith, G., van de Pol, J. (eds) Integrated Formal Methods. IFM 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3771. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11589976_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11589976_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-30492-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32240-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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