14849633
A study of Japanese software process practices and a potential for improvement using SOFL
The goal of this paper is to examine the Japanese experience with the software development process, the challenges they face and how formal engineering methods, in particular SOFL (structured object-oriented formal language), can help overcome these problems. We also recommend additional management tools and documents that can aid organizations in achieving a higher CMM rating through the use of SOFL.
11705717
Generating test data from state-based specifications
SUMMARY Although the majority of software testing in industry is conducted at the system level, most formal research has focused on the unit level. As a result, most system-level testing techniques are only described informally. This paper presents formal testing criteria for system level testing that are based on formal specifications of the software. Software testing can only be formalized and quantified when a solid basis for test generation can be defined. Formal specifications represent a significant opportunity for testing because they precisely describe what functions the software is supposed to provide in a form that can be automatically manipulated. This paper presents general criteria for generating test inputs from state-based specifications. The criteria include techniques for generating tests at several levels of abstraction for specifications (transition predicates, transitions, pairs of transitions and sequences of transitions). These techniques provide coverage criteria that are based on the specifications and are made up of several parts, including test prefixes that contain inputs necessary to put the software into the appropriate state for the test values. The test generation process includes several steps for transforming specifications to tests. These criteria have been applied to a case study to compare their ability to detect seeded faults. Copyright c � 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
18135743
A clustering entropy-driven approach for exploring and exploiting noisy functions
Linear, Gaussian, fitness proportional, clustering, and Rosca entropies are succinct measures of diversity that have been applied to balance exploration and exploitation in evolutionary algorithms. In previous studies, an entropy-driven approach using linear entropy explicitly balances and/or searches optimal solutions for the selected unimodal and multimodal functions excluding noisy functions. This paper investigates the reasons for such an exception and introduces a clustering entropy-driven approach to solve the problem. Such an approach provides a coarse-grained diversity measure that filters the noise of functions, varies cluster size and categorizes individuals at the genotype level. The experimental results show that the clustering entropy-driven approach further improves the searching results of noisy functions by one more degree.
23663426
Evolution: a more practical approach than refinement for software development
Refinement of operations is well defined in terms of refinement rules and is considered as a reasonable discipline for software development. This paper, however, observes that refinement is not sufficient to serve this role for the entire software development process and then proposes evolution for substitution. We show that refinement is indeed a special case of evolution and evolution is transitive. A small case study is given to demonstrate that using evolution rather than refinement as the discipline for software development is a more practical approach. The idea presented in this paper may be controversial, but the author believes that this idea is more useful, practical, and instructive than refinement approach, and expects to inspire more discussions about this issue.
14515232
An investigation of the approach to specification-based program review through case studies
Software review is an effective means to enhance the quality of software systems. However, traditional review methods emphasize the importance of the way to organize reviews and rely on the quality of the reviewers' experience and personal skills. In this paper we propose a new approach to rigorously reviewing programs based on their formal specifications. The fundamental idea of the approach is to use a formal specification as a standard to check whether all the required functions and properties in the specification are correctly implemented by its program. To help investigate the effectiveness and the weakness of the approach, we conduct two case studies of reviewing two program systems that implement the same formal specification of "A Research Management Policy" using different strategies, and present the evaluation of the case studies. The results show that the review approach is effective in detecting faults when the reviewer is different from the programmer, but less effective when the reviewer is the same as the programmer.
36526611
Formal Engineering for Industrial Software Development - An Introduction to the SOFL Specification Language and Method
Formal methods have been developed as a rigorous approach to computer systems development over last three decades, but have been facing challenges in fighting for industrial acceptance in general. Most commonly used formal methods do not offer comprehensible structuring mechanism for building complex systems; formal refinement is not sufficient to deal with real development situations; and formal verification requires high skills and is time-intensive, and is therefore expensive to be adopted by industry.
1310843
AER EAR: A Matched Silicon Cochlea Pair With Address Event Representation Interface
In this paper, we present an analog integrated circuit containing a matched pair of silicon cochleae and an address event interface. Each section of the cochlea, modeled by a second-order low-pass filter, is followed by a simplified inner hair cell circuit and a spiking neuron circuit. When the neuron spikes, an address event is generated on the asynchronous data bus. We present the results of the chip characterization and the results of an interaural time difference based sound localization experiment using the address event representation (AER) EAR. The chip was fabricated in a 3-metal 2-poly 0.5-mum CMOS process