A JML-Based strategy for incorporating formal specifications into the software development process

This thesis presents a JML-based strategy that incorporates formal specifications into the software development process of object-oriented programs. The strategy evolves functional requirements into a “semi-formal” requirements form, and then expressing them as JML formal specifications. The strategy is implemented as a formal-specification pseudo-phase that runs in parallel with the other phase of software development. What makes our strategy different from other software development strategies used in literature is the particular use of JML specifications we make all along the way from requirements to validation-and-verification.

SysPRE: systematized process for requirements engineering in knowledge discovery projects

The domain of Knowledge Discovery (KD) and Data Mining (DM) is of growing importance in a time where more and more data is produced and knowledge is one of the most precious assets. Having explored both the existing underlying theory, the results of the ongoing research in academia and the industry practices in the domain of KD and DM, we have found that this is a domain that still lacks some systematization. We also found that this systematization exists to a greater degree in the Software Engineering and Requirements Engineering domains, probably due to being more mature areas. We believe that it is possible to improve and facilitate the participation of enterprise stakeholders in the requirements engineering for KD projects by systematizing requirements engineering process for such projects. This will, in turn, result in more projects that end successfully, that is, with satisfied stakeholders, including in terms of time and budget constraints. With this in mind and based on all information found in the state-of-the art, we propose SysPRE - Systematized Process for Requirements Engineering in KD projects. We begin by proposing an encompassing generic description of the KD process, where the main focus is on the Requirements Engineering activities. This description is then used as a base for the application of the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) so that we can specify a formal ontology for this process. The resulting SysPRE ontology can serve as a base that can be used not only to make enterprises become aware of their own KD process and requirements engineering process in the KD projects, but also to improve such processes in reality, namely in terms of success rate.

JML- Based formal development of a Java card application for managing medical appointments

Although formal methods can dramatically increase the quality of software systems, they have not widely been adopted in software industry. Many software companies have the perception that formal methods are not cost-effective cause they are plenty of mathematical symbols that are difficult for non-experts to assimilate. The Java Modelling Language (short for JML) Section 3.3 is an academic initiative towards the development of a common formal specification language for Java programs, and the implementation of tools to check program correctness. This master thesis work shows how JML based formal methods can be used to formally develop a privacy sensitive Java application. This is a smart card application for managing medical appointments. The application is named HealthCard. We follow the software development strategy introduced by João Pestana, presented in Section 3.4. Our work influenced the development of this strategy by providing hands-on insight on challenges related to development of a privacy sensitive application in Java. Pestana’s strategy is based on a three-step evolution strategy of software specifications, from informal ones, through semiformal ones, to JML formal specifications. We further prove that this strategy can be automated by implementing a tool that generates JML formal specifications from a welldefined subset of informal software specifications. Hence, our work proves that JML-based formal methods techniques are cost-effective, and that they can be made popular in software industry. Although formal methods are not popular in many software development companies, we endeavour to integrate formal methods to general software practices. We hope our work can contribute to a better acceptance of mathematical based formalisms and tools used by software engineers. The structure of this document is as follows. In Section 2, we describe the preliminaries of this thesis work. We make an introduction to the application for managing medical applications we have implemented. We also describe the technologies used in the development of the application. This section further illustrates the Java Card Remote Method Invocation communication model used in the medical application for the client and server applications. Section 3 introduces software correctness, including the design by contract and the concept of contract in JML. Section 4 presents the design structure of the application. Section 5 shows the implementation of the HealthCard. Section 6 describes how the HealthCard is verified and validated using JML formal methods tools. Section 7 includes some metrics of the HealthCard implementation and specification. Section 8 presents a short example of how a client-side of a smart card application can be implemented while respecting formal specifications. Section 9 describes a prototype tools to generate JML formal specifications from informal specifications automatically. Section 10 describes some challenges and main ideas came acrorss during the development of the HealthCard. The full formal specification and implementation of the HealthCard smart card application presented in this document can be reached at https://sourceforge.net/projects/healthcard/.

Os desafios da educação hospitalar para além da escola formal: um estudo das práticas desses educadores

Orientador: Robson Luiz de França

Representações sociais de velhice em contexto de prestação formal de cuidados

Universidade da Madeira. Centro de Ciência e Tecnologia da Madeira