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Integrating Domain Analysis into Formal Specifications
Abstract
Reusability is widely suggested as a key to improve software development productivity. It has been further argued that reuse at domain level can significantly increase reuse at later stages of development. The development of a particular system that exploits previously accumulated domain knowledge can be the source for new insights about the domain that adds to or refines. The classification of similar problems grouped by domains is the key to find reusable solutions that belong to similar problems. This work deals with the integration of a reusability model into a formal method in order to enhance the benefits of reusability at the domain and design levels. Working with formal methods, software reuse problems such as the detection of inconsistencies in component integration can be revealed in early stages of development. The rigorous approach to industrial software engineering (RAISE) (George et al., 1995) formal method was originally designed to be applied at different levels of abstraction as well as stages of software development. It includes several definition styles of specifications such as model-based or property-based, applicative or imperative, sequential or concurrent. However, it is not easy to identify reusable specifications, due to the fact that objects identified from this method tend not to be reusable in other applications as they are defined without a proper domain perspective. Even though RAISE supports object-orientation, the major approaches to object identification (keyword analysis, structured analysis, scenario-based analysis) can not provide support for reusability and adaptability of applications without analyzing the commonality and variability among a family of applications in a domain (Lee, Kang, Chae, & Choi, 2000). To address this problem, there have been methods for reuse whose development has been based on the notion of “domain orientation” (Barstow, 1985; Prieto-Diaz, 1987), which emphasizes a group of closely related applications in a domain rather than a single application. The exploitation of commonality across related software systems is a fundamental technical requirement to achieve successful software reuse. Software product lines (PL) (Kang, Kim, Lee, & Kim, 2003) present a solid approach in large scale reuse. Due to the PL’s inherit complexity, many PL methods use the notion of “features” to support domain modeling (e.g., FODA) (Kang et al., 1990), FORM (Kang, Kim, Lee, & Kim, 1998), FeatuRSEB (Griss, Allen, & d´Alessandro, 1998). These methods identify common abstractions across the applications of a domain in order to engineer reusable domain components. Feature modeling mainly focuses on identifying commonalities and variabilities among products of a PL, and organizing them in terms of structural relationships (e.g., aggregation and generalization) and configuration dependencies (e.g., required and excluded). This work is related to the introduction of a featureoriented reuse method to the RAISE components specifications and to give a solution to “bridge” the gap between the domain analysis and the specifications in RAISE (Riesco, Felice, Debnath, & Montejano, 2005). In particular, FORM method (feature-oriented reuse method) is introduced in order to gradually improve the reuse of RSL (George et al., 2002) components specifications, incorporating the effectiveness of software reusability as an integral part of the software specification process, considering the following: • To create a plan of reuse as part of the project plan • To add steps to look for and evaluate reusable component candidates to use in the project • To add guidelines to create a future component for reuse • To evaluate the benefits and costs associated with the practice of reuse in the project • To finally identify created components of the project which have the potential for reuse in the future
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