Design recovery through formal specification

The benefits of formal methods in software development are well recognised and well documented. Design recovery involves analysing the source code and recovers the desired design elements based on design recovery specification. One way to ensure the correctness of the recovered design is to use formal methods in the process. This paper describes an approach to apply formal methods to design recovery. We present the Concept Mapping Language (CML), which is largely based on an adapted form of first-order languages with an object-oriented syntactical extension, to specify the recovery specification that guides the design recovery process. CML enforces consistency in the specification through formal notations and syntax, and the formal specification ensures correctness in the recovered design through formally correct specification. The result is a simple and reliable approach to apply formal methods to design recovery that will ensure correctness in the specification and therefore the recovered design