SIGSOFT

This report reviews the presentations and discussions at a workshop on the software development and maintenance process held 6-8 February 1984 in Egham, England.

It is commonly thought that 10 years is needed for technology to pass from its initial conception into wide-spread use. In the process of gathering data to argue the need for a technology improvement program, we investigated the technology maturation ...

Software design - from 'topmost' specification down to final implementation - is viewed as a chain of uniform steps, each step being a transformation between two linguistic levels. A canonical form of the step is discussed and it is argued that all ...

This paper describes the evaluation and introduction of the Vienna Development Method (VDM) into an IDEC development project. We firstly describe why VDM was chosen and follow this with a simple VDM specification based on an Electronic Mail System. The ...

This paper presents a generalization of two fundamental programming concepts, LOCAL ABSTRACTIONS and GLOBAL ABSTRACTIONS, and a survey of several mechanisms for implementing them. Global abstractions are semantic definitions (of objects) used throughout ...

A programmer often writes and tests programs in a bottom-up manner, producing code fragment by fragment and testing each fragment on a few examples to convince himself that the program works so far. These intermediate tests are typically lost without ...

Quality has become an important concept in the marketplace recently. Have American workers traditionally produced "garbage"? Have standards for quality ever been defined? The intense competition created by the automobile industry in the last decade has ...