Abstract
Formal specification methods have not been embraced wholeheartedly by the software development industry. We believe that a large part of industry's reluctance is due to semantic gaps that are encountered when attempting to integrate formal specification with other stages of the software development process. Semantic gaps necessitate a dramatic shift in a programmer's mode of thought, and undergoing many such shifts during the development of a software system is inefficient We identify semantic gaps in the software development process and show how they can be minimized by an approach called metamorphic programming that operates in-the-large and in-the-small. The main contribution that metamorphic programming makes to formal specification is to clarify the ways in which specifications can be merged smoothly into the software development lifecycle.
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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Penny, D.A., Holt, R.C., Godfrey, M.W. (1991). Formal specification in metamorphic programming. In: Prehn, S., Toetenel, W.J. (eds) VDM'91 Formal Software Development Methods. VDM 1991. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 551. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-54834-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-54834-3_4
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