Abstract not found

The way that refinement of individual “local” components of a specification relates to development of a “global” system from a specification of requirements is explored. Observational interpretation of specifications and refinements add expressive power and flexibility while bringing in some subtle problems. Our study of these issues is carried out in the context of Casl architectural specifications. We introduce a definition of observational equivalence for Casl models, leading to an observational semantics for architectural specifications for which we prove important properties. Overall, this fulfills the long-standing goal of complementing the standard semantics of Casl specifications with an observational view that supports observational refinement of specifications in combination with Casl-style architectural design.

This paper describes an in-code approach to automatic algebraic-based software testing and a number of useful design patterns for doing it. The approach uses algebras as testable views on a system. These views form test interfaces which are highly automatable. Specifications are expressed in terms of axioms of the algebras. We use the testing tool T2 to provide automation. T2 works with in-code specifications; these are specifications written directly in a programming language. Because in-code specifications do not need any additional skill to master, they are more likely to be adopted by engineers on the field. Because they need no additional tools to parse and to keep them insync with the implementation, they are much cheaper to maintain. So, for real uses they have a good chance to scale up. 1