A four-way framework for validating a specification
SAICSIT '10 Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists
Translation of Z specifications to executable code: Application to the database domain
Information and Software Technology
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Formal specifications have been a focus of software engineering research for many years and have been applied in a wide variety of settings. Their use in software engineering not only promotes high-level verification via theorem proving or model checking, but also inspires the "correct-by-construction" approach to software development via formal refinement. Although this correct-by-construction method proves to work well for small software systems, it is still a utopia in the development of large and complex software systems. This paper moves one step forward in this direction by designing and implementing a sound linkage between the high level specification language Object-Z and the object-oriented specification language Spec#. Such a linkage would allow system requirements to be specified in a high-level formal language but validated and used in program language level. This linking process can be readily integrated with an automated program refinement procedure to achieve correctness-by-construction. In case no such procedures are applicable, the obtained contract-based specification can guide programmers to manually generate program code, which can then be verified against the obtained specification using any available program verifiers.