Crossing the Borderline — From Formal to Semi-Formal Specifications
Andreas Bollin · 2007
Being part of the systems’ documentation state-based formal specifications can play a crucial role in the software development process. However, besides dense mathematical expressions, their semantical compactness and lack in visually appealing notations impede their use and comprehensibility among different stakeholders. One solution to this problem is to enrich the specification by a semi-formal view, in most cases diagrams with a sufficiently understood semantic meaning. However, as control- and data-dependencies within declarative specifications are hard to detect, existing approaches only cover statics-bearing diagrams. As a way out this paper presents an approach for control- and data dependency analysis within declarative formal specifications. Based on these dependencies, UML diagrams showing static and dynamic properties of the specification are generated. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.