Formal Specification in Metamorphic Programming

Authors: David A. Penny Richard C. Holt Michael W. Godfrey

Venue: 4th Intl. Symposium of VDM Europe, 1991

Year: 1991

Abstract: Formal specification methods have not been embraced wholeheartedly by the software development industry. We believe that a large part of industry's reluctance is due to semantic gaps that are encountered when attempting to integrate formal specification with other stages of the software development process. Semantic gaps necessitate a dramatic shift in a programmer's mode of thought, and undergoing many such shifts during the development of a software system is inefficient We identify semantic gaps in the software development process and show how they can be minimized by an approach called metamorphic programming that operates in-the-large and in-the-small. The main contribution that metamorphic programming makes to formal specification is to clarify the ways in which specifications can be merged smoothly into the software development lifecycle.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{davida.penny1991fsimp,
    author = "David A. Penny and Richard C. Holt and Michael W. Godfrey",
    title = "Formal Specification in Metamorphic Programming",
    year = "1991",
    booktitle = "Proc. of the 4th Intl. Symposium of VDM Europe"
}

Plain Text:

David A. Penny, Richard C. Holt, and Michael W. Godfrey, "Formal Specification in Metamorphic Programming," 4th Intl. Symposium of VDM Europe