Property Preserving Redesign of Specifications

Abstract

Abstract. In the traditional formal approach to system specification and implementation, the software development process consists of a number of refinement steps which transform the initial specification into its correct realisation. This idealised view can hardly capture common situations when a specification changes in a non-incremental way, e.g. when client requirements change or new software technologies emerge. An extra flexibility can be added to the development process by allowing for a redesign of specifications, in addition to refinement steps. In this paper, the notion of specification redesign is formalised for an arbitrary institution. Basic properties of redesign are investigated and the formalism is applied to provide a formal semantics for UML class diagram transformations. As examples, two refactoring patterns are described in terms of class diagrams and interpreted as redesigns of corresponding algebraic specifications.

Co‐Algebraic Semantic Framework for Reasoning about Interaction Designs

“…Originally introduced by Opdyke in [31] in the context of OO programming, refactoring has been widely used in modern software development processes such as Rational Unified Process [18] and eXtreme Programming [6] to support iterative software development and improve the quality of software artifacts. More recently, expression 'model refactoring' was coined to witness the shift of emphasis from code to the design level [40,43,46].…”

Redesign of UML class diagrams: a formal approach

“…In the paper [ZMK05], the notion of specification redesign is defined in the terms of arbitrary institutions. Basic properties of redesign are investigated and the formalism is applied to provide a formal, institution-independent semantics for UML class diagram transformations.…”

A Coalgebraic Semantic Framework for Reasoning about UML Sequence Diagrams

“…Later, interest in research shifted from the code level to model refactoring [25,26], which is a rather new topic. A few references in the UML context include [15,26,29], although most of them restrict themselves to class diagrams. This paper introduces a new, coalgebraic semantics for UML interaction models represented, as usual, by sequence diagrams.…”