Formal Specifications of Software Model Evolution Using Contracts

Abstract

During the object-oriented software development process, a variety of models of the system is built. All these models are semantically overlapping and together represent the system as a whole. In this chapter, we present a classification of relationships between models along three different dimensions, proposing a formal description of them in terms of mathematical contracts, where the software development process is seen as involving a number of agents (the development team and the software artifacts) carrying out actions with the goal of building a software system that meets the user requirements. In this way, contracts can be used to reason about correctness of the development process, and to compare the capabilities of various groupings of agents in order to accomplish a particular contract. The goal of the proposed formalization is to provide formal foundations for tools that perform intelligent analysis on models assisting software engineers through the software life cycle.