Lowering the barriers to the use of formal techniques

Dean Allemang

Organon Motives, Inc.
1 Williston Road Suite 4
Belmont, MA 02178
Tel: (617) 484 3383 x13
Fax: (617) 484-3363
Email: dta@organon.com

Abstract:

Despite the wide variety of approaches to formal methods for program specification, verification and construction that are available, most programmers still feel that they are not worth the effort. A common reply to this objection is that while it might not be worthwhile to work out a formal description of a single program, that software engineered for reuse can amortize the cost of formalization over the lifetime of a reused component. Unfortunately, widespread institutionalized reuse of software components is not a common practice, which means that opportunities for such amortization are rare. This paper suggests an alternative means for making the use of formal methods tractable for programming, involving the use of a Functional Representation of a program, allowing a more flexible interpretation of what it means to compose devices, thereby relaxing some of the constraints on formal description methods.

Keywords: Functional Representation, Formal specification of components, aspect oriented programming

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