Comparing formal specifications by measuring

Abstract

Teaching formal specification notations nowadays in regular software engineering courses presents more or less the same problems as teaching programming languages 15 years ago. Most software engineering students are practical. Issues of predicting code sizes from the size of the specification, issues of expressing problem complexity in terms of specification size are far more interesting for engineers than detailed semantic issues. Based on this observation, we are conducting a study to the proper use of formal specification notations in the process of software development. In this paper we discuss a number of notations in their use in the development of a simple case. The notations themselves are examined with regard to maturity, tool support, analyzability and executability.