John W. Sheppard
ABSTRACT
A widely accepted approach to software development involves successive refinement of design and requirements specifications from a top-level description of the system down to the code level. As the system is refined, it is verified at each phase of development before proceeding to the next phase. In the past, several tools and techniques have been developed to assist in the development and verification process.
Tools have been developed and have been in use for many years to examine the testability and system information flow in hardware systems. These problems are approached as a knowledge base verification and validation problem. Several strong analogues exist between hardware and software systems. However, several fundamental differences exist which affect the approach to modeling and verifying the system.
This paper briefly describes past efforts in verifying hardware and software systems and then presents a preliminary synthesis and extension of these past efforts to the software verification problem. We then conclude with an assessment of our current status and note future directions and recommendations for research in this area.
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Index Terms
- Functional path analysis: an approach to software verification
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