Feature Refinement

  • Authors:

  • Steve Reeves;David Streader

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand;University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

  • Venue:
  • SEFM '07 Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Development by formal stepwise refinement offers a guarantee that an implementation satisfies a specification. But refinement is frequently defined in such a restrictive way as to disallow some useful development steps. Here we de- fine feature refinement to overcome some limitations of re- finement and show its usefulness by applying it to examples taken from the literature. Using partial relations as a canonical state-based semantics and labelled transition systems as a canonical event-based semantics, we degine functions formally linking the state- and event-based operational semantics. We can then use this link to move notions of refinement between the event- and state-based worlds. An advantage of this abstract approach is that it is not restricted to a specific syntax or even a specific interpretation of the operational semantics