Chapter 5

• The role and importance of specification in many phases of software engineering.
• The different purposes of specifications; the different styles and languages used for specification, the different goals for specifications, the different targets of specifications.
• The important qualities required of specifications, including clarity, precision, consistency, completeness, and evolvability.
• How to use specifications for the purpose of verifying implementation correctness.
• The importance of validation in verifying the correctness of specifications.
• The differences between operational and descriptive specification styles and when and how to apply either one.
• How to use formal specifications to enable generation of test data, generation of models for simulation, and derivation and proof of properties.
• How to apply some important operational specification formalisms including: Data Flow Diagrams, Finite State Machines, Petri Nets, and Statecharts.
• How to apply some important descriptive specification notations including Entity Relationship Diagrams, mathematical logic-based notations, and algebraic notations such as Larch.
• UML notations (use case diagrams, sequence diagrams, collaboration diagrams, activity diagrams, and Statecharts).
• How to apply the important set-theoretic specification language Z.
• The importance of modularization techniques for structuring large specifications that are needed in practice.

Resources

• PowerPoint Slides