Specifying software specification & design methods

Abstract

To support customizing and integrating software specification & design methods to a suitable method for designers’ problem domain and environment, so-called Computer Aided Method Engineering (CAME), we need a meta model for representing the fragments of methods formally and for composing them into a method. This paper discusses a meta modelling technique by using a formal specification language Object-Z which is an object oriented version of the Z language. The logical expressions of Object-Z allows us to describe hierarchical structures and the constraints in the methods and the inheritance mechanism enables us to integrate method fragments into a new method.