3,458 papers · page 165 of 173
Over the past several years, a number of techniques have been developed to address various issues involving software reuse, such as component classification, retrieval, and integration. However, it is not adequate to only have reuse techniques that address reuse issues separately…
The relational database model is currently the target of choice for the conversion of legacy software that uses older models (such as indexed-sequential, hierarchical or network models). The relational model makes up for its lower efficiency by a greater expressive power and by o…
Service providers hosting software on servers at the request of content providers need assurance that the hosted software has no undesirable properties. This problem applies to browsers which host applets, networked software which can host software agents, etc. The hosted softwar…
The connection between some modularity properties and interpolation is revisited and restated in a general "logic-independent" framework. The presence of uniform interpolants is shown to assist in certain proof obligations, which suffice to establish the composition of refinement…
Modern software systems are designed and implemented in a modular fashion by composing individual components. The advantages of early validation are widely accepted in this context, i.e., that defects in individual module designs and implementations may be detected and corrected …
Despite vast interest in design patterns, the specification and application of patterns is generally assumed to rely on manual implementation. We describe a precise method of specifying how a design pattern is applied: by phrasing it as an algorithm in a meta-programming language…
Most component models in use today are language-independent, but also platform-dependent and not designed specifically to support a tool-based visual development paradigm. Espresso is a new component model that was designed with the goal of supporting software development through…
Building knowledge-based systems from reusable elements is a key factor in developing them economically. However, one has to ensure that the assumptions and functionality of the reused building block fit together with each other and the specific circumstances of the actual proble…
It can be argued that for (semi-)automated software development, program schemas are indispensable, since they capture not only structured program design principles but also domain knowledge, both of which are of crucial importance for hierarchical program synthesis. Most researc…
Despite their strengths, object-oriented methods (OOMs) and their supporting CASE tools often do not produce model that are amenable to rigorous semantic analysis. This is a direct result of their loosely defined semantics. The authors outline their ongoing work on providing a se…
Given a program S and a precondition Q, the strongest postcondition, denoted sp(S,Q), is defined as the strongest condition that holds after the execution of S, given that S terminates. By defining the formal semantics of each of the constructs of a programming language, a formal…
The paper presents a static pointer analysis technique for a subset of C. The tool supports user-defined assertions inserted in the body of the program. Assertions are of two kinds: static assertions automatically verified by the analyser, and hypothetical assertions treated as a…
This article presents an approach to identify abstract data types (ADT) and abstract state encapsulations (ASE, also called abstract objects) in source code. This approach groups together functions, types, and variables into ADT and ASE candidates according to the proportion of f…
This paper describes some tools to support formal methods, and conversely some formal methods for developing such tools. We focus on distributed cooperative proving over the web. Our tools include a proof editor/assistant, servers for remote proof execution, a distributed truth p…
In this paper a reuse-oriented perspective is taken to designing and implementing configurable distributed applications. An application domain is defined as a family of systems that have some features in common and others that differentiate them. During domain engineering, reusab…
While a user might be able to confidently validate a generalized fragment by inspection, since calling an off-hook user should result in a busy signal (when the system only has one line per user), more complex behavior can be impractical to validate by inspection. This is particu…
Most contemporary fourth-generation languages (4GL) are tightly coupled with the database server, and other subsystems, that are provided by the vendor. As a result organizations that wish to change database vendors are typically forced to rewrite their applications using the new…
Software development is a knowledge-intensive activity involving the integration of diverse knowledge sources that undergo constant change. The volatility of knowledge in software development requires that knowledge bases are able to support a continuous knowledge acquisition pro…
Given a software library whose entries are represented by formal specifications, we distinguish between two retrieval procedures: exact retrieval, whereby, given a query K, we identify all the library components that are correct with respect to K; approximate retrieval, which is …
While a software process is being executed, many errors and problems occur which require to reconsider previously executed process steps. In order to handle feedback in a process management system, several requirements need to be addressed: adaptability, human intervention, impac…