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Course Title: Formal Specification Using Z and VDM
(Nazir Ahmad Zafar)
Objective of the Course
Why Formal Specification Approaches?
The increasing confidence, errors finding at final stages of software development, resolution of
ambiguities, lake of tool support, etc are some of the issues in using traditional software
engineering approaches. For example, it becomes very expensive to remove if the errors are
found at the final stages of software development. These problems can be minimized using
formal specification approaches at the early stage of development.
What are Formal Approaches?
Formal approaches are software engineering techniques, which provide highest confidence in
throughout life cycle of the software development. Formal approaches enable the systems
developer to specify, develop, and verify a computer-based system by applying a rigorous,
mathematical notation. Use of formal specification languages provides a means of specifying the
system so that consistency, completeness and correctness can be assessed in a systematic way.
Formal specification and refinement of systems can be extended towards implementation.
Formal methods can be integrated with existing programming languages, and can be applied to
requirements analysis, testing, safety analysis, and object-oriented approaches.
Z and VDM: Modeling and Specification Languages
More than 90 specification languages with tool support are in use today. The Vienna
Development Method and Z notation are most commonly used, which will be studied in this
course. Z is a set of conventions for presenting mathematical text, chosen to make it convenient
to use simple mathematics to describe computing systems. In Z usually we model a system by
representing its state a collection of state variables, and some operations that can change its state.
A model that is characterized by the operations it describes is called an abstract data type.
This Course
This course will provide an insight into established techniques and will help developers to
overcome the complexity of software development by constructing models of software systems
in real design stages. It will also provide formal mechanisms for specifying, validating and
verifying software systems. Students will be able to develop a mechanism for detecting and
eliminating many problems arising from ambiguity, incompleteness and inconsistencies in the
early stage of systems development. Further students will understand meaning of Software
Engineering and will be able to specify the requirements in Z and VDM. Also they will know
using VDM toolbox and Z Eves tools for the validation and verification of systems. At the end of
the day students will find a relationship between VDM and Z which will be one step forward in
understanding systems development using integrated approaches.
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