Achieving dependability throughout the development process: a distributed software experiment

Distributed software engineering techniques and methods for improving the specification and testing phases are considered. To examine these issues, an experiment was performed using the design diversity approach in the specification, design, implementation, and testing of distributed software. In the experiment, three diverse formal specifications were used to produce multiple independent implementations of a distributed communication protocol in Ada. The problems encountered in building complex concurrent processing systems in Ada were also studied. Many pitfalls were discovered in mapping the formal specifications into Ada implementations.