Predictive software metrics based on a formal specification
Information and Software Technology
The relationship between slices and module cohesion
ICSE '89 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Software engineering
Deriving modular designs from formal specifications
SIGSOFT '93 Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Using Z: specification, refinement, and proof
Using Z: specification, refinement, and proof
Software maintenance and evolution: a roadmap
Proceedings of the Conference on The Future of Software Engineering
Goal-driven combination of software comprehension approaches for component based development
SSR '01 Proceedings of the 2001 symposium on Software reusability: putting software reuse in context
Service Channels - Purpose and Tradeoffs
COMPSAC '98 Proceedings of the 22nd International Computer Software and Applications Conference
ICSE '81 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Software engineering
Applying Software Metrics to Formal Specifications: A Cognitive Approach
METRICS '98 Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Software Metrics
Program slices: formal, psychological, and practical investigations of an automatic program abstraction method
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis
Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis
An empirical study of slice-based cohesion and coupling metrics
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Concept location in formal specifications
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
Software engineering and formal methods
Communications of the ACM - Enterprise information integration: and other tools for merging data
Using formal specifications to support testing
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
The exterminators [software bugs]
IEEE Spectrum
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Formal specifications are not an exception for aging. Furthermore, they stay valid resources only in the case when they have been kept up to date during all evolutionary changes taking place. As specifications are then not just written once, an interesting aspect is whether they do also deteriorate or not. In order to answer this question, this paper addresses the issues on various kinds of changes in the development of formal specifications and how they could be measured. For this, a set of semantic-based measures is introduced and then used in a longitudinal study, assessing the specification of the Web-Service Definition Language. By analyzing all 139 different revisions of it, it is shown that specifications can deteriorate and that it takes effort to keep them constantly at high quality. The results yield in a refined model of software evolution exemplifying these recurring changes.