Harnessing rCOS for Tool Support—The CoCoME Experience - Formal Methods and Hybrid Real-Time Systems - page 83

Harnessing rCOS for Tool Support
—The CoCoME Experience

Zhenbang Chen 1 , Xiaoshan Li 2 , Zhiming Liu 1 , ,VolkerStolz 1 , and Lu Yang 1

1 United Nations University
Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST)
2 Faculty of Science and Technology, The University of Macau

Abstract. Complexity of software development has to be dealt with
by dividing the different aspects and different views of the system and
separating different concerns in the design. This implies the need of dif-
ferent modelling notations and tools to support more and more phases
of the entire development process. To ensure the correctness of the mod-
els produced, the tools therefore need to integrate sophisticated checkers,
generators and transformations. A feasible approach to ensure high qual-
ity of such add-ins is to base them on sound formal foundations. This
paper reports our experience in the work on the Common Component
Modelling Example (CoCoME) and shows where such add-ins will fit. In
particular, we show how the formal techniques developed in rCOS can
be integrated into a component-based development process, and where
it can be integrated in and provide extension to an existing successful
commercial tool for adding formally supported checking, transformation
and generation modules.

Keywords: Software development tool, software process, formal meth-
ods, tool design.

1 Introduction

Software engineering is now facing two major challenges on

1. how to handle the huge complexity of system development, and
2. how to ensure the correctness and quality of the software

The complexity of software development is inherent due to many different aspects
of the system, including those of static structure, flow of control, interactions and
functionality, and different concerns of functionality correctness, concurrency,
distribution, mobility, security, timing, and so on. Large software development

This work is partially supported by the projects HighQSoftD and HTTS funded
by Macao Science and Technology Development Fund, NSFC-60673114 and 863 of
China 2006AA01Z165.
I started working on separation and integration of models of different aspects and
concerns of systems when I started my study for my Master Degree [24] under the
supervision of Professor Zhou Chaochen.