Is There Evolution Before Birth? Deterioration Effects of Formal Z Specifications

Formal specifications are not an exception for aging. Furthermore, they stay valid resources only in the case when they have been kept up to date during all evolutionary changes taking place. As specifications are then not just written once, an interesting aspect is whether they do also deteriorate...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFormal Methods and Software Engineering pp. 66 - 81
Main Author Bollin, Andreas
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Subjects
Change Request
Cohesion Measure
Deterioration Effect
Formal Method
Software Metrics
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Summary:Formal specifications are not an exception for aging. Furthermore, they stay valid resources only in the case when they have been kept up to date during all evolutionary changes taking place. As specifications are then not just written once, an interesting aspect is whether they do also deteriorate or not. In order to answer this question, this paper addresses the issues on various kinds of changes in the development of formal specifications and how they could be measured. For this, a set of semantic-based measures is introduced and then used in a longitudinal study, assessing the specification of the Web-Service Definition Language. By analyzing all 139 different revisions of it, it is shown that specifications can deteriorate and that it takes effort to keep them constantly at high quality. The results yield in a refined model of software evolution exemplifying these recurring changes.
ISBN:9783642245589
3642245587
ISSN:0302-9743
1611-3349
DOI:10.1007/978-3-642-24559-6_7