An Application of SOFL for Rapid Prototyping

Abstract

A prototype is a model of a product or information system to show the capabilities. It is common practice to build prototypes in agile software development to help end-users and developers understand the requirements elicitation and validation for a system. Though the prototypes can serve with behaviors and structures, some requirements such as safety-critical functions are difficult to prototype. Formal methods are used to reveal ambiguity, inconsistency and incompleteness for development computer systems with commonly used formal specification languages. Formal methods are mathematically-based techniques. Nevertheless few specifiers have used complete mathematics from the beginning. Most of specifiers have discussed with end-users about implications of user requirements, created an initial specification, and revised as a result of the user’s feedbacks. This paper presents an experimental project adapting rapid prototyping into a formal engineering method. SOFL, the formal engineering method, serves as a bridge between formal methods and rapid prototyping. It has great potential to improve development costs and product quality.