Formal Specification Techniques for Engineering Modular C Programs

Software is difficult to develop, maintain, and reuse. Two factors that contribute to this difficulty are the lack of modular design and good program documentation. The first makes software changes more difficult to implement. The second makes programs more difficult to understand and to maintain. This work describes an approach to promoting program modularity. It presents a formal specification language that promotes software modularity through the use of abstract data types, even though the underlying programming language may not have such support. This language is structured to allow useful information to be extracted from a specification, which is then used to perform consistency checks between the specification and its implementation. The book also describes a specification-driven, software re-engineering process model for improving existing programs. The aim of this process is to make existing programs easier to maintain and reuse while keeping their essential functionalities unchanged. This book should be suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level courses in software engineering, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.