Article

A micromodularity mechanism

Authors:

Daniel Jackson,

Ilya Shlyakhter,

Manu SridharanAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE-9: Proceedings of the 8th European software engineering conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

Pages 62 - 73

https://doi.org/10.1145/503209.503219

Published: 01 September 2001 Publication History

Abstract

A simple mechanism for structuring specifications is described. By modelling structures as atoms, it remains entirely first-order and thus amenable to automatic analysis. And by interpreting fields of structures as relations, it allows the same relational operators used in the formula language to be used for dereferencing. An extension feature allows structures to be developed incrementally, but requires no textual inclusion nor any notion of subtyping. The paper demonstrates the flexibility of the mechanism by application in a variety of common idioms.

References

[1]

R. Duke, G. Rose and G. Smith. Object-Z:A Specification Language Advocated for the Description o Standards. SVRC Technical Report 94-45.The So tware Verification Research Centre, University of Queensland, Australia.

[2]

John V.Guttag,James J.Horning,and Andres Modet. Report on the Larch Shared Language:Version 2.3. Technical Report 58,Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto,CA,1990.

[3]

Daniel Jackson.Automating irst-order relational logic. Proc.ACM SIGSOFT Conf.Foundations o So tware Engineering.San Diego,November 2000.

Digital Library

[4]

Daniel Jackson.Alloy:A Lightweight Object Modelling Notation.To appear,ACM Transactions on So tware Engineering and Methodology,October 2001.

Digital Library

[5]

Daniel Jackson,Ian Schechter and Ilya Shlyakhter.Alcoa: the Alloy Constraint Analyzer.Proc.International Conference on So tware Engineering,Limerick,Ireland, June 2000.

Digital Library

[6]

Daniel Jackson and Jeannette Wing.Lightweight Formal Methods.In:H.Saiedian (ed.),An Invitation to Formal Methods.IEEE Computer,29(4):16-30,April 1996.

Digital Library

[7]

Michael Jackson.So tware Requirements and Specifications: A Lexicon o Practice,Principles and Prejudices.Addison- Wesley,1995.

Digital Library

[8]

Clif Jones.Systematic So tware Development Using VDM. Second edition,Prentice Hall,1990.

Digital Library

[9]

Kathleen Jensen and Nicklaus Wirth.Pascal:User Manual and Report.Springer-#Verlag,1974.

Digital Library

[10]

K.Rustan M.Leino and Greg Nelson.Data abstraction and information hiding .Research Report 160,Compaq Systems Research Center,November 2000.

[11]

Hector Levesque,Fiora Pirri,and Ray Reiter.Foundations or the Situation Calculus.Link~ping Electronic Articles in Computer and Information Science,ISSN 1401-9841,Vol. 3(1998),Nr.018.

[12]

Robin Milner,Mads To te and Robert Harper.The De inition o Standard ML.MIT Press,1990.

Digital Library

[13]

S.Owre,N.Shankar,J.M.Rushby,and D.W.J.Stringer- Calvert.PVS Language Reference.Computer Science Laboratory,SRI International,Menlo Park,CA,September 1999.

[14]

J.Michael Spivey.The Z Notation:A Reference Manual. Second edition,Prentice Hall,1992.

Digital Library

[15]

Ian Toyn et al.Formal Specification -Z Notation -Syntax, Type and Semantics.Consensus Working Dra t 2.6 o the Z Standards Panel BSI Panel IST/5/-/19/2 (Z Notation). August 24,2000.

[16]

Jim Woodcock and Jim Davies.Using Z:Specification, Refinement and Proo .Prentice Hall,1996.

Digital Library

[17]

Jos Warmer and Anneke Kleppe.The Object Constraint Language:Precise Modeling with UML.Addison Wesley, 1999.

Digital Library

[18]

Pamela Zave and Michael Jackson.Conjunction as Composition.ACM Transactions on So tware Engineering and Methodology II(4):379 -411,October 1993.

Digital Library

Cited By

Cornejo CRegis GAguirre NFrias M(2023)A Study of the Electrum and DynAlloy Dynamic Behavior NotationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.332062549:11(4946-4963)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3320625
Zheng GNguyen TBrida SRegis GAguirre NFrias MBagheri HRyu SSmaragdakis Y(2022)ATR: template-based repair for Alloy specificationsProceedings of the 31st ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3533767.3534369(666-677)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3533767.3534369
Wang RLiu SSato Y(2021)SIT-SE: A Specification-Based Incremental Testing Method With Symbolic ExecutionIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2021.307871470:3(1053-1070)Online publication date: Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TR.2021.3078714
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A micromodularity mechanism
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Requirements analysis
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. System description languages
      1. Specification languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Logic
  2. Models of computation
    1. Computability

Recommendations

Alloy: a lightweight object modelling notation

Alloy is a little language for describing structural properties. It offers a declaration syntax compatible with graphical object models, and a set-based formula syntax powerful enough to express complex constraints and yet amenable to a fully automatic ...
A micromodularity mechanism

A simple mechanism for structuring specifications is described. By modelling structures as atoms, it remains entirely first-order and thus amenable to automatic analysis. And by interpreting fields of structures as relations, it allows the same ...
Logical frameworks as a basis for verification tools: a case study
KBSE '95: Proceedings of The 10th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference

Wide-spread acceptance and use of formal methods in software development hinges on the availability of powerful tools. Tools must be both reliable and offer real assistance to the user. Logical frameworks are a suitable medium to build such tools, since ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC/FSE-9: Proceedings of the 8th European software engineering conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

September 2001

329 pages

ISBN:1581133901

DOI:10.1145/503209

Conference Chairs:
A. Min Tjoa
Vienna Univ. of Technology, Vienna, Austria
,
Volker Gruhn
Univ. of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes Volume 26, Issue 5
Sept. 2001
329 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/503271
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2001 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

CEPIS: Council of European Professional Informatics Societies
VIENUT: Vienna University of Technology
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 September 2001

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

ESEC/FSE01

Sponsor:

CEPIS
VIENUT
SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE01: European Software Engineering Conference 2001/ Foundations on Software Engineering 2001

September 10 - 14, 2001

Vienna, Austria

Acceptance Rates

ESEC/FSE-9 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 137 submissions, 21%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

97
Total Citations
View Citations
631
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)59
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5

Reflects downloads up to 11 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Cornejo CRegis GAguirre NFrias M(2023)A Study of the Electrum and DynAlloy Dynamic Behavior NotationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.332062549:11(4946-4963)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3320625
Zheng GNguyen TBrida SRegis GAguirre NFrias MBagheri HRyu SSmaragdakis Y(2022)ATR: template-based repair for Alloy specificationsProceedings of the 31st ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3533767.3534369(666-677)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3533767.3534369
Wang RLiu SSato Y(2021)SIT-SE: A Specification-Based Incremental Testing Method With Symbolic ExecutionIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2021.307871470:3(1053-1070)Online publication date: Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TR.2021.3078714
Davari MBertino EBertino ELin DLobo J(2018)Reactive Access Control SystemsProceedings of the 23nd ACM on Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies10.1145/3205977.3208947(205-207)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3205977.3208947
Regis GCornejo CGutiérrez Brida SPolitano MRaverta FPonzio PAguirre NGaleotti JFrias MBodden ESchäfer WDeursen AZisman A(2017)DynAlloy analyzer: a tool for the specification and analysis of alloy models with dynamic behaviourProceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3106237.3122826(969-973)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3106237.3122826
Bagheri HMalek SZimmermann TCleland-Huang JSu Z(2016)Titanium: efficient analysis of evolving alloy specificationsProceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2950290.2950337(27-38)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2950290.2950337
Macedo NBrunel JChemouil DCunha AKuperberg DZimmermann TCleland-Huang JSu Z(2016)Lightweight specification and analysis of dynamic systems with rich configurationsProceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2950290.2950318(373-383)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2950290.2950318
Moscato MPombo CFrias M(2014)DynamiteACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/254413623:2(1-37)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2544136
Jaygarl HKim SXie TChang CTonella POrso A(2010)OCATProceedings of the 19th international symposium on Software testing and analysis10.1145/1831708.1831729(159-170)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1831708.1831729
Hansen KIngstrup MShin SOssowski SSchumacher MPalakal MHung C(2010)Modeling and analyzing architectural change with alloyProceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/1774088.1774560(2257-2264)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1774088.1774560
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents