Mathematical notation in formal specification: Too difficult for the masses? [Correspondence]

The phrase “not much mathematics required” can imply a variety of skill levels. When this phrase is applied to computer scientists, software engineers, and clients in the area of formal specification, the word “much” can be widely misinterpreted with disastrous consequences. A small experiment in reading specifications revealed that students already trained in discrete mathematics and the specification notation performed very poorly; much worse than could reasonably be expected if formal methods proponents are to be believed.

Tambalacoque. For a formal account of the gist of a scholarly argument

Argumentation as reflected in a short communication from the published literature of botany and zoology is discussed. Trying to capture the logic structure of the argument, however imperfectly, is relevant to information science and depends on a particular goal: namely, to potentially benefit the task of sketching the relationship between bibliographic entries in a better manner than is possible with present-day bibliometric or scientometric practice. This imposes tight limits on the depth of analysis of the text.

Effects of structure on the comprehensibility of formal specifications

Use of structuring mechanisms (such as modularisation) is widely believed to be one of the key ways to improve software quality. Structuring is considered to be at least as important for specification documents as for source code, since it is assumed to improve comprehensibility. Yet, as with most widely held assumptions in software engineering, there is little empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. Also, even if structuring can be shown to he a good thing, we do not know how much structuring is somehow optimal. One of the more popular formal specification languages, Z, encourages structuring through its schema calculus. A controlled experiment is described in which two hypotheses about the effects of structure on the comprehensibility of Z specifications are tested. Evidence was found that structuring a specification into schemas of about 20 lines long significantly improved comprehensibility over a monolithic specification. However, there seems to be no perceived advantage in breaking down the schemas into much smaller components. The experiment can he fully replicated.