A study on the Practicality of Integration Tools for Semi-formal and Formal Software Engineering Modeling Methods

Abstract

Reliability and stability are desirable in most systems because mistakes can be extremely costly. Writing correct specifications can lead to this needed reliability. Formal specifications languages help in writing precise specifications. However, formal modeling practitioners admit that the production of formal specifications is not an easy matter, and requires experience. For these reasons, the graphical notations generally and UML specially are more popular, in spite of the fact that they lack formal semantics. An integrated semi-formal tools considered promising suggestion of getting the benefits of both and minimize their shortcomings. This thesis introduces an experiment on using an integrated semi-formal modeling tool (RoZ) for generation of formal Z specifications in order to evaluate to what extent, using integrated semi-formal modeling tools is successful, practical and could be done by inexperienced modelers. Our animation-based experiment gave positive results, and showed that RoZ-based case study model is equivalent to a manually generated one. The experiments also showed the successful performance of these integrated semi-formal modeling tool in producing software models.