Software process description using LOTOS and its enaction

Abstract

Software processes can be treated as cooperative works among several engineers. In order to enact a software process in a distributed environment, the engineers must communicate with each other for exchanging data values and synchronization messages. Such communications should be described in a process description for enacting the process automatically and clarifying the engineers' work. Since these communications are numerous, it is troublesome for the process designers to describe them minutely in the process description. They also make the description unreadable. We propose a formal software process model where we describe only a whole description of a process in which we describe only the contents and temporal orders of primitive activities, and do not specify the communications. From the whole description, we derive each engineer's individual description, automatically where the contents and orders of his activities and communications to others are described. A whole process is enacted by executing all individual descriptions in parallel. Both whole and individual descriptions are described in LOTOS/SPD, an extension of the formal specification language LOTOS. We have also developed a support system for deriving the individual descriptions and executing them on UNIX machines.<>