A methodology for deriving an object-oriented design from functional specifications

A recent paradigm in software engineering is object-oriented software development. However, object-oriented methods still remain ad hoc, and the process of deriving an object-oriented design from the·early analysis has not yet been formalised. The authors advocate deriving a formal specification from informal requirements, conducting static analysis on the formal functional specifications to reason about the intended behaviour of the system, and then transforming the flat specification to an object-oriented design. The transformations discussed in this paper can be formalised and can be applied to any model-oriented specification to get a corresponding object-oriented design. The methodology is illustrated for a simple library management system using the model-oriented specification technique VDM