SOFL: A Formal Engineering Methodology for Industrial Applications
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Software architecture adaptability: an NFR approach
IWPSE '01 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution
Minimally and Maximally Abstract Retrenchments
IFM '02 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Integrated Formal Methods
Applying SOFL to Specify A Railway Crossing Controller for Industry
WIFT '98 Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on Industrial Strength Formal Specification Techniques
Engineering and theoretical underpinnings of retrenchment
Science of Computer Programming
Property transformation under specification change
Frontiers of Computer Science in China
Integrating prototyping into the SOFL three-step modeling approach
ICFEM'11 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Formal methods and software engineering
Model evolution and refinement
Science of Computer Programming
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Refinement of operations is well defined in terms of refinement rules and is considered as a reasonable discipline for software development. This paper, however, observes that refinement is not sufficient to serve this role for the entire software development process and then proposes evolution for substitution. We show that refinement is indeed a special case of evolution and evolution is transitive. A small case study is given to demonstrate that using evolution rather than refinement as the discipline for software development is a more practical approach. The idea presented in this paper may be controversial, but the author believes that this idea is more useful, practical, and instructive than refinement approach, and expects to inspire more discussions about this issue.