A Development Framework for Object-Oriented Specification and Refinement

This paper presents a language-independent framework for developing formal speciications in an intuitively object-oriented style. Within the framework, object-oriented concepts and design strategies are captured by the application of development operators. The operators, by eeec-tively hiding the technical details of how object-oriented concepts are captured in a given speci-cation language, allow the speciier to develop speciications in an intuitively object-oriented fashion. They also present a exible approach to object-oriented speciication as libraries of operators can be deened allowing many diierent dee-nitions of object-oriented features to be available. This enables a close mapping to be achieved between the speciication and the implementation in the chosen object-oriented programming language. The framework also records the history of operator application enabling \classes" and \modules" to be identiied in the resulting spec-iications and, hence, the possibility of modular veriication and reenement.