Proceedings of IT Congress '97, Macau, pp. 187-192 (1997)

Integrating Object-Oriented and Formal Specifications:
A FOOD Approach
1

T.H. Tse 2

[technical report TR-96-01]

 ABSTRACT

Object-oriented analysis and design methodologies are being considered as the "paradigm of choice" in software engineering today. There is, however, a lack of any formal supporting framework, so that the validation and verification of specifications are ad hoc and incomplete. Although a number of formal methods have been proposed independently, many software engineers are not too enthusiastic about them. We present a project known as Functional Object-Oriented Design (FOOD), which attempts to provide a bridge between popular and formal methods. We propose a user-friendly graphical front-end interface for a formal language FOOPS. Most of the graphical notations are adapted from existing methodologies, thus relieving the user from having to learn an alien set of mathematical symbols. The original rigour and algebraic semantics of FOOPS are preserved.

1. Part of this research was done at the Programming Research Group, University of Oxford under an SERC Visiting Fellowship and an ACM Visiting Fellowship.
2. Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
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