Building an evolution transformation library

The authors have been developing knowledge-based tools to support the evolutionary development of specifications. Evolution is accomplished by means of evolution transformations, which are meaning-changing transformations applied to formal specifications. A sizable library of evolution transformations has been developed for the specification language Gist. The authors assess the results of their previous work on evolution transformations. They then describe their current efforts to build a versatile, usable evolution transformation library. They have identified important dimensions along which to describe transformation functionality, so that it is possible to assess the coverage of a library along each dimension. The potential applicability of this formal evolution paradigm to other environments is assessed