Formal Specification in Metamorphic Programming

Formal specification methods have not been embraced wholeheartedly by the software development industry. We believe that a large part of industry’s reluctance is due to semantic gaps that are encountered when attempting to integrate formal specification with other stages of the software development process. Semantic gaps necessitate a dramatic shift in a programmer’s mode of thought, and undergoing many such shifts during the development of a software system is inefficient. We identify semantic gaps in the software development process and show how they can be minimized by an approach called metamorphic programming that operates in-the-large and in-the-small. The main contribution that metamorphic programming makes to formal specification is to clarify the ways in which specifications can be merged smoothly into the software development lifecycle.