A formal development framework and its use to manage software production

Within an ESPRIT project called FORMAST the authors devised the concept of a ƒorm to bring together all aspects of the development of a 'module' (i.e. specification, design and verification) within a distributed asynchronous system. The use of ƒorms can be extended to other compositional system development scenarios. Using ƒorms in a top-down fashion means that the logical interaction between the modules already designed and the formal specifications of modules required to complete the implementation can readily be ascertained. Moreover, this can be done at any stage of development. Thus one can maintain an overall view of the entire system design and use this to monitor the progress of program construction. This then provides a notion of traceability from a management standpoint.