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Modular Programming and Reasoning for Living with Uncertainty

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Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1077))

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Abstract

Embracing uncertainty in software development is one of the crucial research topics in software engineering. In most projects, we have to deal with uncertain concerns by using informal ways such as documents, mailing lists, or issue tracking systems. This task is tedious and error-prone. Especially, uncertainty in programming is one of the challenging issues to be tackled, because it is difficult to verify the correctness of a program when there are uncertain user requirements, unfixed design choices, and alternative algorithms. If uncertainty can be dealt with modularly, we can add or delete uncertain concerns to/from code whenever they arise or are fixed to certain concerns. This paper proposes a new programming and reasoning style based on Modularity for Uncertainty. The iArch-U IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is developed to support uncertainty-aware software development. The combined usage of a type checker and a model checker in iArch-U plays an important role in verifying whether or not some important properties are guaranteed even if uncertainty remains in a program. Our model checker is based on LTSA (Labelled Transition System Analyzer) and is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in. Agile methods embrace change to accept changeable user requirements. On the other hand, our approach embraces uncertainty to support exploratory software development.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We focused on the design and implementation of an uncertainty-aware model checker in our previous work [49]. In this paper, we discuss on not only uncertainty-aware reasoning including the model checker but also uncertainty-aware programming by extending our preliminary work [20, 21, 52]. We show the world of uncertainty-aware software development and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a concrete usage scenario.

  2. 2.

    http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/ltsa/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

  3. 3.

    https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/projects/fdr/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

  4. 4.

    http://www.cprover.org/cbmc/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/javapathfinder/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

  6. 6.

    http://posl.github.io/iArch/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

  7. 7.

    https://junit.org/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

  8. 8.

    https://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

  9. 9.

    https://eclipse.org/Xtext/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

  10. 10.

    https://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

  11. 11.

    https://www.eclipse.org/graphiti/, Last accessed 18 November 2018.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Syunya Nakamura, Keisuke Watanabe, and Takuya Fukamachi for their great contributions. They were students of Naoyasu Ubayashi. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP26240007.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Naoyasu Ubayashi, Yasutaka Kamei & Ryosuke Sato

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  1. Naoyasu Ubayashi
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  2. Yasutaka Kamei
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  3. Ryosuke Sato
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Correspondence to Naoyasu Ubayashi .

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  1. Information Systems Group, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Marten van Sinderen

  2. Wrocław University of Economics, Wrocław, Poland

    Leszek A. Maciaszek

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Ubayashi, N., Kamei, Y., Sato, R. (2019). Modular Programming and Reasoning for Living with Uncertainty. In: van Sinderen, M., Maciaszek, L. (eds) Software Technologies. ICSOFT 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1077. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29157-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29157-0_10

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