A supporting tool for syntactic analysis of sofl formal specifications and automatic generation of functional scenarios

Abstract

SOFL formal specifications have been proved to be useful and expressive enough in describing functional requirements for software development. And based on SOFL formal specifications, many techniques have been proposed to provide us with effective solutions for software verification and validation. To support these techniques, a tool support for analysis of specifications is necessary. However, such a tool is still not available. In this paper, we present our work on a supporting tool. This tool supplies two fundamental functions: syntactic analysis of SOFL formal specifications and automatic generation of functional scenarios. By syntactic analysis, we can get syntactic information of SOFL formal specifications. The tool creates an xml file for storing and reusing this syntactic information. Functional scenarios are well-structured predicate expressions, which could be derived from formal specifications. Many formal specification-based techniques require the generation of functional scenarios. Our tool also supports automatic generation of functional scenarios on the basis of the syntactic information. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.