Experiences with software specification and verification using LP, the Larch proof assistant

Welcome to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) held in Zurich, Switzerland, on June 2nd and 3rd, 2012. Having grown from a Software Process Workshop in 2005 to the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) in 2007, and finally to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) in 2011, this conference series has established its place in the software engineering community as a respected conference focusing on research and practice related to software and systems development process. Software and software systems development use processes as one major means for achieving and ensuring the quality of the final product. This leads to specific challenges regarding software processes such as simplicity, adaptability, standard conformance, the coordination of multiple domains and lifecycles, etc. Processes from other domains (e.g., health care, manufacturing, business, aerospace, automotive systems, and others) face similar challenges. Yet, they share interesting similarities with and differences to software processes. The question is: How can we in the software domain learn from other domains to meet our software process engineering challenges? The ICSSP conferences hence connect the traditional software and systems process community with outside views and insights, broadening its scope of software development processes to system development and explicitly including processes of other domains such as health care, business, and manufacturing. By sharing process development theories and practices from such domains, ICSSP 2012 is investigating novel solutions to today's process challenges. Correspondingly, the main theme of ICSSP 2012 is Beyond Software and Software Systems Processes, signaling our goal of learning from domains other than the traditional software process community.

Formal methods encompass a wide choice of techniques and tools for the specification, development, analysis, and verification of software and hardware systems. Formal methods are widely applied in industry, in activities ranging from the elicitation of requirements and the early design phases all the way to the deployment, configuration, and runtime monitoring of actual systems. Formal methods allow one to precisely specify the environment in which a system operates, the requirements and properties that the system should satisfy, the models of the system used during the various design steps, and the code embedded in the final implementation, as well as to express conformance relations between these specifications. We present a broad scope of successful applications of formal methods in industry, not limited to the well-known success stories from the safety-critical domain, like railways and other transportation systems, but also covering other areas such as lithography manufacturing and cloud security in e-commerce, to name but a few. We also report testimonies from a number of representatives from industry who, either directly or indirectly, use or have used formal methods in their industrial project endeavours. These persons are spread geographically, including Europe, Asia, North and South America, and the involved projects witness the large coverage of applications of formal methods, not limited to the safety-critical domain. We thus make a case for the importance of formal methods, and in particular of the capacity to abstract and mathematical reasoning that are taught as part of any formal methods course. These are fundamental Computer Science skills that graduates should profit from when working as computer scientists in industry, as confirmed by industry representatives.

Good research ideas often arise from critical observation of inconsistencies between researchers’ assumptions about software development and practical reality. This dissonance creates a kind of friction that can spark research ideas. This is the text for the Stevens Award Lecture on November 8, 2005. The Stevens Award was created to recognize outstanding contributions to the literature or practice of methods for software and systems development.

Formal methods for software development receive much attention in research centres, but are rarely used in industry for the development of (large) software systems. One of the reasons is that little is known about the integration of formal methods in the software process, and the exact role of formal methods in the software life-cycle is still unclear. In this paper, a detailed examination is made of the application of, and the benefits resulting from, a generally applicable formal method (VDM) in a standard model for software development (DoD-STD-2167A). Currently, there is no general agreement on how formal methods should be used, but in order to analyse the use of formal methods in the software process, a clear view of such use is essential. Therefore, we show what is meant by ‘using a formal method’. The different activities of DoD-STD-2167A are analysed with regard to their suitability for applying VDM and the benefits that may result from applying VDM for that activity. Based on this analysis, an overall view on the usage of formal methods in the software process is formulated.

The automotive industry has encountered fundamental changes in the last decade, e.g. increased international competition, more complex and diversified products, and strongly changing product development processes. Nowadays, electrical/electronic (E/E) systems play a crucial role in vehicle development in order to offer innovative and attractive products to customers. Therefore, it is vital for an automotive OEM to master E/E systems over the entire life‐cycle. Besides sound engineering, an effective project and risk management becomes more and more important. Synchronizing all the development activities and all involved stakeholders is a major challenge here. This is of key importance, as the E/E system represents a triplicate highly distributed structure, in terms of process, organization, and the product itself.This paper illustrates lessons learned from implementing synchronization management within the E/E system development as part of a major process improvement initiative. The paper starts by highlighting the paradigm shift within the development processes of an automotive OEM from “component‐driven” development to “system‐oriented” engineering. Based on this background the need for synchronization of all involved “players” within E/E system development will be pointed out. The development and implementation of a generic synchronization/master plan as well as the usage and tailoring of this plan for specific projects will be described. Also, embedding this E/E synchronization management within the overall vehicle development process will be discussed (e.g. how to handle changes within the development process). The paper finally highlights lessons learned during the phases of conception, implementation, and application of the generic master plan and the synchronization management process.

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 8th ACM International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD'09). This volume comprises the final versions of the research and industry papers presented at the AOSD'09 conference held in Charlottesville, Virginia (USA), March 2-6, 2009. The proceedings also contain the abstracts of the keynote presentations. AOSD'09 is the eighth edition in a series of annual AOSD conferences. The series started in 2002 in Enschede (The Netherlands), followed by Boston, Massachusetts (USA) in 2003, Lancaster (UK) in 2004, Chicago, Illinois (USA) in 2005, Bonn (Germany) in 2006, Vancouver (Canada) in 2007, Brussels (Belgium) in 2008, and now Charlottesville, Virginia (USA) in 2009. This year's conference continues the tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of research and industry results on leading-edge issues in aspect-oriented software development. The theme of this edition, Modularity Across the Software Ecosystem, was chosen to reflect the remarkable growth in scale and complexity of the systems now being developed, where modularity and abstraction are essential, not only in code, but across many kinds of software artifacts, systems, and indeed the whole software ecosystems. Although the central influence of the first editions of the conference was on programming languages and their use, the focus has been broadening to include other activities of software and systems development, such as software and systems specification, architecture, and adaptation. This year, an effort was made to emphasize architecture design, requirements analysis and engineering, aspect modeling, tests, and processes. Thus, the mission of this edition is to fulfill the needs of heterogeneous applications and environments, and to identify new directions for future research and development. AOSD'09 gives academia and industry a unique opportunity to share perspectives with others who are interested in the various forms of modularity and abstraction. The conference program reflects the balance between research and practice with a mix of research papers, reports from industry, student events, an industrial panel, birds of a feather sessions, and demonstrations. The six workshops held before the start of the conference reflect the breadth of topics of interest to the AOSD community. In addition to the presentation of research and industry papers across seven sessions, the technical program of AOSD'09 includes three keynotes talks: The Future of Software Architectures For Large-Scale Business Solutions: Modularity, Scalability, and Separation Of Concerns by Paul Daugherty, Cyber Physical Systems: Aspects as a Basis for Robustness and Openness by John A. Stankovic, and Everyday Aspects by Gail Murphy. These keynote talks represent, respectively, sophisticated views from the enterprise computing industry, computer systems research, and from the AOSD research community itself. The call for research papers for AOSD'09 elicited 86 abstracts from the international community, of which 68 were realized as full papers. Each research paper was reviewed by at least three referees, in most cases by four. All papers co-authored by Program Committee (PC) members were reviewed by at least five referees. Based on the reviews, the whole PC discussed the submissions' quality, leading to the selection of 19 research papers for presentation as part of the technical program. In previous AOSD editions, the PC discussions occurred during a physical meeting attended by all PC members. Due to the unforeseen global economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, and rising environmental concerns, the AOSD'09 research papers were discussed among the PC members through teleconferencing and online forums. This volume of AOSD'09 also includes four industrial papers advanced from the Industrial Track submissions. Representing the evolution in the industrial adoption of aspect-oriented technologies, these papers characterize the diversity and value in commercial application. The Industrial Track provides the opportunity to observe the introduction of a resonating technology to the ever present challenge of scale and complexity in a highly constrained world. To further discover challenges with industrial adoption, the paper presentations are partnered with an Industrial Panel to interactively dissect the challenges to quicken the pace to further industrial success stories.

With the introduction of the Industrial/sup IT/ vision at ABB, the coordination of hardware and software development is a crucial aspect that the organization needs to address. Software development and hardware production processes need to be coordinated into one coherent lifecycle model to optimize development. This paper presents some basic concepts in software and hardware development lifecycles and paves the road for a more comprehensive approach for a system development lifecycle.

Formal methods in Computer Science are a particular kind of mathematically-based techniques for the specification, development and verification of software and hardware systems. Among them, Petri Nets have been widely used because of their high expressive power and accurate description capabilities. On the other hand, Dynamical Systems theory has not been used for these purposes so far. In this paper we present the first use of Discrete Dynamical Systems under the aim to better analyze Concurrent Computing Systems. In order to do that, Petri Nets, PNs, are properly encoded into DDSs, so defining the corresponding Phase Space with its metric structure and the evolution operator of the system.

This paper discusses a Unified Modelling Language (UML) based formal verification methodology for early error detection in the model-based software development cycle. Our approach proposes a UML-based formal verification process utilising functional and behavioural modelling artifacts of UML. It reinforces these artifacts with formal model transition and property verification. The main contribution is a UML to Labelled Transition System (LTS) Translator application that automatically converts UML Statecharts to formal models. Property specifications are derived from system requirements and corresponding Computational Tree Logic (CTL)/Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) model checking procedure verifies property entailment in LTS. With its ability to verify CTL and LTL specifications, the methodology becomes generic for verifying all types of embedded system behaviours. The steep learning curve associated with formal methods is avoided through the automatic formal model generation and thus reduces the reluctance of using formal methods in software development projects. A case study of an embedded controller used in military applications validates the methodology. It establishes how the methodology finds its use in verifying the correctness and consistency of UML models before implementation.

This paper presents a new approach, model theory approach, to small and medium scale transaction processing system (TPS) development. A TPS of this paper is an information system designed to process day-to-day business event data at operational level of an organization. The paper is not concerned with data base construction but with transaction processing. The model theory approach is not a software engineering approach but a systems theory approach. In the approach a model of the target system, which is called a user model, is constructed in set theory using a formal system structure of a TPS. The user model is, then, compiled into an extended Prolog (extProlog) model. The extProlog is an extension of Prolog to meet requirements for management information system development. On compilation a standardized user interface (UI) called internal UI is attached. The extProlog model with the internal UI is, then, executed under control of another standardized UI called an external UI. Implementation is an integral part of the approach. Because the UIs are designed for the formalized (abstract) structure of a TPS, they can be standardized and are provided as black box components to system development. Because a systems developer is required to only build a user model in set theory based on a model theoretic structure in the approach, it is called a model theory approach. Advantages of this approach are that it provides a theoretical structure to information systems development so that systems development can be made an engineering discipline, and facilitates rapid systems development.

There are several different technical disciplines focused on improving the systems that humans use, creating an ‘alphabet soup’ of acronyms to stay abreast of. While they all build upon a common emphasis of developing systems around their users, there are differences (both perceived and real) across disciplines such as Human Factors Engineering (HFE), Human Systems Integration (HSI), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), User Experience (UX), and Design Thinking (DT). A panel discussed what each of these disciplines are (and what they are not), when and how they get involved in system development, their philosophies and methods for system development, and where they share common interests. Panelists were asked philosophical, practical, and scenario-based questions, before opening the floor to the audience.

Introducing formal methods to existing processes

Substantial changes are occurring in systems development. In response, attempts are being made to empower system developers through technology. The predominant response being CASE. Even if CASE were an accepted enabling technology, it is not a sufficient technology. CASE focuses on the technical aspects of system development work. System developers need complementary technology to help with the social aspects. Eventually these two types of technology will need to be combined into a more complete system development support environment. But first, technology to support the social aspects of system development work needs to be sought out or developed. One social aspect is the necessary involvement of groups in nontrivial systems development situations. One class of social support technology is GDSS. The authors describe a laboratory experiment designed to test the efficacy of using GDSS to support an aspect of system development work. Results show small but significant differences in quality and quantity outcomes in favour of GDSS when novice system developers performed the same system development task twice, under controlled laboratory conditions, once with GDSS support and once without.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The emergence of a corona virus called Covid-19, has caused a pandemic throughout the world, especially Indonesia. Many people do not understand about this virus. The game, which was developed with 2D-based Construct 3, is expected to attract more users’ attention to learn about Covid-19, such as Symptoms, History, Health Protocols, and Vaccines. Then, along with the development of increasingly advanced technology, it will facilitate learning and socialization, namely with this Quiz Game. This study intends to create a Covid-19 quiz educational game developed with quizzes of various levels for users to achieve, with research subjects people in general. This game uses the SDLC (System Development Life Cycle) method with the waterfall method. SDLC waterfall is one of the many system development methods that is quite popular and is often used by system developers, web-based applications, information systems, but not only that SDLC waterfall can also be applied in various other software, one of which is in the development game applications, especially educational games. The test results will use blackbox in the quiz educational game, and run without any errors or defects. The results of the validity and reliability test of the 70 people’s questionnaire are respectively valid and consistent/reliable. It can be concluded that the development of this game can help to educate the Indonesian people regarding Covid-19.

Design management systems have been developed and researched for traditional product and service industries. For interaction design little research has been performed on design management. The objective of this paper is to describe aspects of and provisions for industrial interaction design that influence approaches to design management within system and software development. We discuss whether there are specific conditions for design management of interaction design within the software and system development industries. The research is based on three short case studies from industrial software development. We identify some of these specific conditions; the difference between a usage and a product perspective, the design tools and practices, and the modularized and distributed processes. These issues point towards challenges facing design management within the software and system development context, as well as the need for interaction design to clarify its position as a strategic resource in software companies. The conclusions point towards the need for continued research on strategic possibilities and alternatives to organize and manage design work in software and system development.