A layered approach to specification authoring, sharing, and usage

Abstract

Compositional reuse of software libraries is important for productivity. To promote reliability and correctness, there must also be a way to compose specifications for reuse. However, specifications cannot be adapted by the use of wrappers in the same ways as code, which leads to specifications being copied and modified. This copying and modification of specifications leads to poor maintainability and technical debt. We propose a system, Spekl, that solves these problems and makes compositional reuse of specifications possible in a way independent of the choice of specification languages and tools. We provide a detailed description of our system as well as provide details on our domain specific language for creating new tools, provide details on how to author new specifications, and demonstrate how Spekl facilitates compositional reuse through specification layering.