Maintainability Assessment for SOFL Formal Specifications
Yu Jian Du, Shaoying Liu · 2023
Formal specifications written in the SOFL specification language have been used in several industrial projects to help enhance software reliability. Experience suggests that specifications need to be frequently changed in different ways during the specification construction process and the specification-based implementation process. To make the changes easy to conduct without introducing potential faults, specifications must be ensured to have a high maintainability. To this end, we must first be able to assess the maintainability of formal specifications, but the problem we are facing is the lack of appropriate metrics for this purpose. To address this problem, we put forward new metrics for assessing the maintainability of formal specifications in this paper. Compared with metrics for code maintainability assessment, our metrics deal with the features of formal specifications that are distinct from code. Most rules in the proposed metrics can be applied to model-based formal specifications in general and only a small part is specific for the SOFL language. We discuss the principle and the assessment rules of our metrics and use a small case study to demonstrate how the metrics work in practice.