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

Author

Alagar, V.S. ; Periyasamy, K.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Concordia Univ., Montreal, Que., Canada

Volume

7

Issue

4

fYear

1992

fDate

7/1/1992 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

247

Lastpage

263

Abstract

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

Keywords

formal specification; library automation; object-oriented programming; software engineering; VDM; formal specification; functional specifications; informal requirements; library management system; model-oriented specification; object-oriented design; software development; static analysis;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering Journal

Publisher

iet

ISSN

0268-6961

Type

jour

Filename

153427