Key Points

• Participants will be introduced to formal notations and structures for reducing the ambiguity inherent in natural language specification. For developers, this will allow a thorough understanding of potential problems prior to development and permits inspections that focus on correctness evaluation. For testers, this permits understanding of what constitutes a testing "failure" and will also supports the construction of better testing models.
• Participants will learn how to use functional models for isolating and then removing incompleteness and nondeterminism from specifications.
• Participants will learn techniques for analyzing the product's input domain especially domain components that may be overlooked e.g. system environment influences.
• Participants will see how formal models can be applied gradually and informally.

Presentation Abstract

This half-day tutorial will show testers and developers how they can use formal methods to analyze and improve software requirements. One of the significant problems of development and testing is having to work from inadequate, incomplete, ambiguous specification documents. This tutorial will introduce informal ways engineers can "think formally" about specification documents to reveal domain gaps, incompleteness, and other problem spots before they have too great an impact on the testing process. We will use a combination of the functional/denotational and model-based approaches.

About the Author

Michael Deck is an internationally-recognized expert in Cleanroom software engineering practices. His consulting company, Cleanroom Software Engineering, Inc., specializes in training project teams to tailor and use Cleanroom practices to solve real-life software process problems.

The company also practices what it teaches, applying Cleanroom practices to contract software-development projects. From 1982 to 1993 he was a member of the IBM Cleanroom Software Technology Center, where he worked closely with the inventors of the Cleanroom approach.

He has a BA in Mathematics from Kalamazoo College and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. His current research interests include application of Cleanroom to object-oriented development, real-time and embedded software, and highly reliable systems. He has published widely on various Cleanroom topics.