A formal framework for specification and analysis of object-oriented designs

Object oriented design (OOD) technology has become a standard in the industry today, due to the fact that it models the real world more precisely and accurately as compared to the traditional structured techniques. This makes object oriented technology easier to understand and in turn easier to maintain. The most constant attribute of software is change. OOD technology uses the same modeling concepts throughout the software life-cycle, thereby handling changes to the software more gracefully. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is largely used as a design and documenting tool for object oriented designs. It is important to evaluate and verify the design at an earlier stage of software development so as to detect errors, which if not detected soon enough can turn out to be expensive at a later stage. This requires rigorous analysis to be performed on the design. To perform rigorous analysis more formality is required. It is also important that the user be able to specify analysis goals for the design as (s)he sees fit. The goal of this research is to provide a formal framework for specification and analysis of object oriented designs. The framework will support rigorous analysis of the design by providing a formal notation and a formal language to specify the analysis goals. The formal notation maps to the UML design and thus incorporates the advantages of both formal and informal specification techniques, without requiring the user to learn the details of the formal specification notation. The formal language developed is simple and close to natural language, once again requiring minimal learning effort from the user. To test the implementation of the language processor, we used design principles as specified by Object Management Group (OMG) on a UML and CSP-based system design. The language was then further extended to support specification of dynamic analysis goals.