How to produce correct software - an introduction to formal specification and program development by transformations

Abstract

The task of software production is to build software systems which are to fulfil certain requirements. For years the approach has been to build up by trial and error a program which, having satisfied carefully prepared test data, offers a plausible solution to the problem. But is it correct? Even for toy examples this is not obvious. In particular, it is often not even clear whether the original problem has been properly understood. The reason for this dilemma is that the transition from the informal problem statement to the final program is too big to be intellectually manageable. To master these problems, we advocate a software development method where the whole process is split into smaller steps by introducing formal specifications for (parts of) the problem and then stepwisely deriving efficient programs by correctness-preserving transformations. © 1992 The British Computer Society.