Transformational Software Evolution by Assertions
Tom Mens · 1970
This paper explores the use of software transformations as a formal foundation for software evolution. More precisely, we express software transformations in terms of assertions (preconditions, postconditions and invariants) on top of the formalism of graph rewriting. This allows us to tackle scalability issues in a straightforward way. Useful applications include: detecting syntactic merge conflicts, removing redundancy in a transformation sequence, factoring out common subsequences, etc. 1.