Synthesizing Structured Analysis and Object-Oriented Specifications

Coleman, David L. and Baker, Albert L. (1994) Synthesizing Structured Analysis and Object-Oriented Specifications. Technical Report TR94-04, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University.

Abstract

Synthesizing Structured Analysis and Object--Oriented Specifications
by
David L. Coleman and Albert L. Baker
ABSTRACT
Structured Analysis (SA) is a widely-used software development
method.  SA specifications are based on Data Flow Diagrams (DFD's),
Data Dictionaries (DD's) and data transformation specifications
(P-Specs).  As used in practice, SA specifications are not formal.
Seemingly orthogonal approaches to specifications are those using
formal, object-oriented, model-based specification languages, e.g.,
VDM, Z, Larch/C++ and SPECS.  These languages support object-oriented
software development in that they are designed to specify abstract
data types (ADT's).  We suggest formalizing SA specifications by: (i)
formally specifying flow value types as ADT's in DD's, (ii) formally
specifying P-Specs using both the assertional style of the
aforementioned specification languages and ADT operations defined in
DD's, and (iii) adopting a formal semantics for DFD ``execution
steps''.
The resulting formalized SA specifications, DFD-SPECS, are
well-suited to the specification of distributed or concurrent systems.
We provide an example DFD-SPEC for a client-server system with a
replicated server.  When synthesized with our recent results in the
direct execution of formal, model-based specifications, DFD-SPECS will
also support the direct execution of specifications of concurrent or
distributed systems.


Subjects:
All uncategorized technical reports


ID code:
00000070
Deposited by:
Staff Account on 03 March 1994





Contact site administrator at: ssg@cs.iastate.edu