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Federation of International Conferences on Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations

STAF 2016: Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations pp 179–195Cite as

Visualization of Formal Specifications for Understanding and Debugging an Industrial DSL

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9946))

Abstract

In this work we report on our proof of concept of a generic approach: visualized formal specification of a Domain Specific Language (DSL) can be used for debugging, understanding, and impact analysis of the DSL programs. In our case study we provide a domain-specific visualization for the Event-B specification of a real-life industrial DSL and perform a user study among DSL engineers to discover opportunities for its application. In this paper, we explain the rationale behind our visualization design, discuss the technical challenges of its realization and how these challenges were solved using the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques. Based on the positive feedback of the user study, we present our vision on how this successful experience can be reused and the approach can be generalized for other DSLs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www3.hhu.de/stups/prob/.

  2. 2.

    www.asml.com.

  3. 3.

    In this work we use the first version of BMotion Studio. Currently the new version, BMotionWeb, is available.

  4. 4.

    Note, that although the graphical notation of LACE is based on UML activity diagrams, the dynamic semantics of LACE does not follow the semantics of UML activity diagrams.

  5. 5.

    One can observe that in Fig. 1(c) “request_ssa_ss1” appears four times in different combinations with other subsystems (“ss2” and “ss3”).

  6. 6.

    Note that as LACE is a programming language specialized to a specific domain, the community of LACE users is not big. We estimate that the response rate for our user study was 50%.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Lukas Ladenberger (Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany) for his help with using BMotion Studio. We are very grateful to all ASML engineers who participated in our user study. We also would like to thank Tom Verhoeff and Tim Willemse (both from Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands) for their advice and feedback on this work and this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Ulyana Tikhonova, Maarten Manders & Rimco Boudewijns

Authors
  1. Ulyana Tikhonova
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  2. Maarten Manders
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  3. Rimco Boudewijns
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ulyana Tikhonova .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita di Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Paolo Milazzo

  2. Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

    Dániel Varró

  3. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Manuel Wimmer

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Tikhonova, U., Manders, M., Boudewijns, R. (2016). Visualization of Formal Specifications for Understanding and Debugging an Industrial DSL. In: Milazzo, P., Varró, D., Wimmer, M. (eds) Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations. STAF 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9946. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50230-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50230-4_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50229-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50230-4

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