An Approach to Integrate Formal Validation in an OO Life-cycle of Protocols
Résumé
Despite excellent results on pilot projects, formal validation based on standard Formal Description Techniques (FDTs) never really catch up in the industry. We claim that this is mainly due to standard FDTs lack of support for the modern software development methods and life-cycles needed in the construction and maintenance of open distributed systems. We propose to go the other way round, that is to integrate formal validation technology within well established object-oriented (OO) development methods. Building on the intuition that a universal language taking into account all the possible semantics aspects of parallelism and communication is a holy grail, we propose to rely on an open (but simpler) OO language to build dedicated frameworks. Such frameworks can be specialized toward classes of distributed applications, and integrate formal validation tools. We illustrate our approach using the famous alternating bit protocol example. We investigate on this example how a continuous validation framework could be set up to go smoothly from the OO analysis to the OO implementation of a validated distributed system.