Skip to main content

David Crocker

Followers

13

Following

1

Co-author

1

Public Views

Gualtiero Piccinini

University of Missouri-Columbia

Mansoura University

Hacettepe University

Vinicius Garcia

Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

Iman Attarzadeh

Islamic Azad University of Tehran, Central branch

Uninassau

Viacheslav Kuleshov

Stockholm University

Dr. Shadab Alam

Jazan University

Ricardo Montero

Universidad Autónoma de Occidente

Nikos Mantzakouras

National & Kapodistrian University of Athens

Interests

Uploads

Papers by David Crocker

Teaching Formal Methods with Perfect Developer

Abstract. In order to teach formal methods successfully, the subject must be presented in a way t... more Abstract. In order to teach formal methods successfully, the subject must be presented in a way that students find relevant, manageable and rewarding. This position paper discusses some of the difficulties in teaching formal methods and suggests solutions. We present an outline of the Perfect Developer tool and describe how we teach our own employees to use it for formally verified software development. 1 Challenges facing Formal Methods teaching staff Formal methods can be successfully taught if the students are willing, the concepts are within their reach, they are given motivational feedback and they are provided with good tools. Each of these areas presents challenges. 1.1 The difficulty of attracting students In many universities, formal methods are taught as an optional module that competes with other modules for students. Several lecturers have informed us that the formal methods module has been less popular in recent years. Based on our discussions, we postulate the followin...

Making Formal Methods popular through Automated Verification

Formal methods of software development have been used in developing mission-critical software for... more Formal methods of software development have been used in developing mission-critical software for some time but have been little used for non-critical development. It is our opinion that formal methods stand no chance of becoming mainstream unless the overheads associated with formal verification can be eliminated and the need for extensive mathematical skill on the part of the user can be avoided. Thanks to advances in theorem proving technology and the availability of substantial processing power at low cost, we believe that fully automated validation is now a practical possibility. We have developed a product supporting the development of object-oriented software components and applications with the aim of providing fully automated validation that links requirements right through to code. This paper details some of our experiences of using this system to develop and validate a large project, namely the compiler/verifier itself.

Teaching Formal methods with Perfect Developer

In order to teach formal methods successfully, the subject must be presented in a way that studen... more In order to teach formal methods successfully, the subject must be presented in a way that students find relevant, manageable and rewarding. This position paper discusses some of the difficulties in teaching formal methods and suggests solutions. We present an outline of the Perfect Developer tool and describe how we teach our own employees to use it for formally verified software development. 1 Challenges facing Formal Methods teaching staff Formal methods can be successfully taught if the students are willing, the concepts are within their reach, they are given motivational feedback and they are provided with good tools. Each of these areas presents challenges. 1.1 The difficulty of attracting students In many universities, formal methods are taught as an optional module that competes with other modules for students. Several lecturers have informed us that the formal methods module has been less popular in recent years. Based on our discussions, we postulate the following reasons ...

Frequency measurements in the 10 ?m infrared spectra of phosphine and allene

International Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves, 1982

Sub-Doppler saturation spectra of phosphine and allene near 10 μm have been obtained using an off... more

Generating commercial web applications from precise requirements and formal specifications

Citeseer

We present a new model-based approach that we are using to build commercial webbased applications... more We present a new model-based approach that we are using to build commercial webbased applications. The user requirements together with a data model are formally specified in a graphical notation using the CREATIV toolset. The specification may be checked by animation before being automatically translated to Perfect notation. The Perfect Developer toolset uses automated reasoning to generate formal proofs of correctness. It then generates C++ or Java code which, in conjunction with an application framework also written in Perfect, forms the complete application including the HTML user interface. The whole process provides a rapid turnaround from new requirements to a formally-verified application.

Mondex Case Study First Workshop

The Mondex Case Study is being be used as an initial experiment for the Verified Software Reposit... more The Mondex Case Study is being be used as an initial experiment for the Verified Software Repository. A number of research groups will work on the same problem in parallel. We have chosen as our problem the Mondex electronic purse work, which was originally specified and refined in Z, and proved correct by hand. That work was some ten years ago and we use this reworking to see what more can be done now compared to then. The kind of questions we hope to address are: What the current state of the art is in mechanising the specification, refinement, and proof? Can we get a full automation of this example? How can we combine the best of each approach? From the previous work we know that the case study will raise some challenging issues and so we hope that this new work to contribute to setting a research agenda for the repository. This Work is the slides and other material from the first workshop.

A High Productivity Tool for Formally Veri ed Software Development

It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless fo... more It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless formal methods are used. The challenge is to bring formal techniques up to date with modern object-oriented approaches to software design and to make their use as productive as informal methods. We believe that such a challenge can be met and we have developed the Escher Tool to demonstrate this. This paper describes some of the issues involved in marrying formal methods with an object-oriented approach, design decisions we took in developing a language for object-oriented speci cation and re nement, and our results in applying the tool to small and large projects.

A 10 W single mode Pyrex waveguide CO2laser

Journal of Physics E: Scientific Instruments

ABSTRACT Describes a Pyrex waveguide carbon dioxide laser operating at a maximum single line powe... more

A high productivity tool for formally verified software development

It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless fo... more It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless formal methods are used. The challenge is to bring formal techniques up to date with modern object-oriented approaches to software design and to make their use as productive as informal methods. We believe that such a challenge can be met and we have developed the Escher Tool to demonstrate this. This paper describes some of the issues involved in marrying formal methods with an object-oriented approach, design decisions we took in developing a language for object-oriented specication and renement, and our results in applying the tool to small and large projects.

Process & system for developing mathematically validated object-oriented software

Perfect Developer: A tool for Object-Oriented Formal Specification and Refinement. Tools Exhibition Notes at Formal Methods Europe

Abstract Perfect Developer is a formal methods tool for developing specifications and refining th... more Abstract Perfect Developer is a formal methods tool for developing specifications and refining them to code High productivity is achieved through the use of a push - button theorem prover using advanced au - tomated reasoning technology The tool can import UML models and generates final code in Java or C++ It is being used both commercially and for teaching

Process and system for validating a computer program segment

Verification of C Programs Using Automated Reasoning

Fifth IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2007), 2007

Much of the embedded software development market has necessarily tight constraints on program siz... more Much of the embedded software development market has necessarily tight constraints on program size and processor power, hence developers use handwritten C rather than autocode. They rely primarily on testing to find errors in their code. We have an established software development tool known commercially as Perfect Developer, which uses a powerful automatic theorem prover and inference engine to reason about requirements and specifications. We have found that automated reasoning can be used to discharge a very high proportion of verification conditions arising from the specification and refinement of software components described in our formal specification language, Perfect. The Perfect Developer tool set can also generate code in a C++ subset or in Java, and the output code is then virtually certain to meet the stated specification, reducing the need for exhaustive testing. However, this is not helpful to developers of embedded software who are constrained to write code by hand. We therefore decided to investigate whether automated reasoning could provide a similar degree of success in the verification of annotated C code. We present our preliminary findings.

Safe Object-Oriented Software: The Verified Design-By-Contract Paradigm

Practical Elements of Safety, 2004

In recent years, large sectors of the software development industry have moved from the procedura... more In recent years, large sectors of the software development industry have moved from the procedural style of software development to an object-oriented style. Safety-critical software developers have largely resisted this trend because of concerns about verifiability of object-oriented systems. This paper outlines the benefits offered by object technology and considers the key features of the object-oriented approach from a user's

A high productivity tool for formally verified software development

It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless fo... more It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless formal methods are used. The challenge is to bring formal techniques up to date with modern object-oriented approaches to software design and to make their use as productive as informal methods. We believe that such a challenge can be met and we have developed the Escher Tool to demonstrate this. This paper describes some of the issues involved in marrying formal methods with an object-oriented approach, design decisions we took in developing a language for object-oriented specication and renement, and our results in applying the tool to small and large projects.

Perfect Developer: A tool for Object - Oriented Formal Specification and Refinement

Perfect Developer is a formal methods tool for developing specifications and refining them to cod... more Perfect Developer is a formal methods tool for developing specifications and refining them to code High productivity is achieved through the use of a push - button theorem prover using advanced au - tomated reasoning technology The tool can import UML models and generates final code in Java or C++ It is being used both commercially and for teaching

Can C++ be made as safe as SPARK?

ACM SIGAda Ada Letters, 2014

Escher Verification Studio Perfect Developer and Escher C Verifier

Formal Verification, 2012

Developing Reliable Software using Object-Oriented Formal Specification and Refinement (Extended abstract prepared 24 March 2003)

It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems un- less ... more It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems un- less formal methods are used. The challenge is to bring formal methods up to date with modern ob- ject-oriented techniques and make its use as productive as traditional methods. We believe that such a challenge can be met and we have developed the Escher Tool to demonstrate this. This paper de- scribes some of the issues involved in marrying formal methods with an object oriented approach, de- sign decisions we took in developing a language for object-oriented specification and refinement, and our results in applying the tool to small and large projects.

Perfect Developer: A tool for rigorous object-oriented software development

Teaching Formal Methods with Perfect Developer

Abstract. In order to teach formal methods successfully, the subject must be presented in a way t... more Abstract. In order to teach formal methods successfully, the subject must be presented in a way that students find relevant, manageable and rewarding. This position paper discusses some of the difficulties in teaching formal methods and suggests solutions. We present an outline of the Perfect Developer tool and describe how we teach our own employees to use it for formally verified software development. 1 Challenges facing Formal Methods teaching staff Formal methods can be successfully taught if the students are willing, the concepts are within their reach, they are given motivational feedback and they are provided with good tools. Each of these areas presents challenges. 1.1 The difficulty of attracting students In many universities, formal methods are taught as an optional module that competes with other modules for students. Several lecturers have informed us that the formal methods module has been less popular in recent years. Based on our discussions, we postulate the followin...

Making Formal Methods popular through Automated Verification

Formal methods of software development have been used in developing mission-critical software for... more Formal methods of software development have been used in developing mission-critical software for some time but have been little used for non-critical development. It is our opinion that formal methods stand no chance of becoming mainstream unless the overheads associated with formal verification can be eliminated and the need for extensive mathematical skill on the part of the user can be avoided. Thanks to advances in theorem proving technology and the availability of substantial processing power at low cost, we believe that fully automated validation is now a practical possibility. We have developed a product supporting the development of object-oriented software components and applications with the aim of providing fully automated validation that links requirements right through to code. This paper details some of our experiences of using this system to develop and validate a large project, namely the compiler/verifier itself.

Teaching Formal methods with Perfect Developer

In order to teach formal methods successfully, the subject must be presented in a way that studen... more In order to teach formal methods successfully, the subject must be presented in a way that students find relevant, manageable and rewarding. This position paper discusses some of the difficulties in teaching formal methods and suggests solutions. We present an outline of the Perfect Developer tool and describe how we teach our own employees to use it for formally verified software development. 1 Challenges facing Formal Methods teaching staff Formal methods can be successfully taught if the students are willing, the concepts are within their reach, they are given motivational feedback and they are provided with good tools. Each of these areas presents challenges. 1.1 The difficulty of attracting students In many universities, formal methods are taught as an optional module that competes with other modules for students. Several lecturers have informed us that the formal methods module has been less popular in recent years. Based on our discussions, we postulate the following reasons ...

Frequency measurements in the 10 ?m infrared spectra of phosphine and allene

International Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves, 1982

Sub-Doppler saturation spectra of phosphine and allene near 10 μm have been obtained using an off... more

Generating commercial web applications from precise requirements and formal specifications

Citeseer

We present a new model-based approach that we are using to build commercial webbased applications... more We present a new model-based approach that we are using to build commercial webbased applications. The user requirements together with a data model are formally specified in a graphical notation using the CREATIV toolset. The specification may be checked by animation before being automatically translated to Perfect notation. The Perfect Developer toolset uses automated reasoning to generate formal proofs of correctness. It then generates C++ or Java code which, in conjunction with an application framework also written in Perfect, forms the complete application including the HTML user interface. The whole process provides a rapid turnaround from new requirements to a formally-verified application.

Mondex Case Study First Workshop

The Mondex Case Study is being be used as an initial experiment for the Verified Software Reposit... more The Mondex Case Study is being be used as an initial experiment for the Verified Software Repository. A number of research groups will work on the same problem in parallel. We have chosen as our problem the Mondex electronic purse work, which was originally specified and refined in Z, and proved correct by hand. That work was some ten years ago and we use this reworking to see what more can be done now compared to then. The kind of questions we hope to address are: What the current state of the art is in mechanising the specification, refinement, and proof? Can we get a full automation of this example? How can we combine the best of each approach? From the previous work we know that the case study will raise some challenging issues and so we hope that this new work to contribute to setting a research agenda for the repository. This Work is the slides and other material from the first workshop.

A High Productivity Tool for Formally Veri ed Software Development

It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless fo... more It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless formal methods are used. The challenge is to bring formal techniques up to date with modern object-oriented approaches to software design and to make their use as productive as informal methods. We believe that such a challenge can be met and we have developed the Escher Tool to demonstrate this. This paper describes some of the issues involved in marrying formal methods with an object-oriented approach, design decisions we took in developing a language for object-oriented speci cation and re nement, and our results in applying the tool to small and large projects.

A 10 W single mode Pyrex waveguide CO2laser

Journal of Physics E: Scientific Instruments

ABSTRACT Describes a Pyrex waveguide carbon dioxide laser operating at a maximum single line powe... more

A high productivity tool for formally verified software development

It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless fo... more It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless formal methods are used. The challenge is to bring formal techniques up to date with modern object-oriented approaches to software design and to make their use as productive as informal methods. We believe that such a challenge can be met and we have developed the Escher Tool to demonstrate this. This paper describes some of the issues involved in marrying formal methods with an object-oriented approach, design decisions we took in developing a language for object-oriented specication and renement, and our results in applying the tool to small and large projects.

Process & system for developing mathematically validated object-oriented software

Perfect Developer: A tool for Object-Oriented Formal Specification and Refinement. Tools Exhibition Notes at Formal Methods Europe

Abstract Perfect Developer is a formal methods tool for developing specifications and refining th... more Abstract Perfect Developer is a formal methods tool for developing specifications and refining them to code High productivity is achieved through the use of a push - button theorem prover using advanced au - tomated reasoning technology The tool can import UML models and generates final code in Java or C++ It is being used both commercially and for teaching

Process and system for validating a computer program segment

Verification of C Programs Using Automated Reasoning

Fifth IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2007), 2007

Much of the embedded software development market has necessarily tight constraints on program siz... more Much of the embedded software development market has necessarily tight constraints on program size and processor power, hence developers use handwritten C rather than autocode. They rely primarily on testing to find errors in their code. We have an established software development tool known commercially as Perfect Developer, which uses a powerful automatic theorem prover and inference engine to reason about requirements and specifications. We have found that automated reasoning can be used to discharge a very high proportion of verification conditions arising from the specification and refinement of software components described in our formal specification language, Perfect. The Perfect Developer tool set can also generate code in a C++ subset or in Java, and the output code is then virtually certain to meet the stated specification, reducing the need for exhaustive testing. However, this is not helpful to developers of embedded software who are constrained to write code by hand. We therefore decided to investigate whether automated reasoning could provide a similar degree of success in the verification of annotated C code. We present our preliminary findings.

Safe Object-Oriented Software: The Verified Design-By-Contract Paradigm

Practical Elements of Safety, 2004

In recent years, large sectors of the software development industry have moved from the procedura... more In recent years, large sectors of the software development industry have moved from the procedural style of software development to an object-oriented style. Safety-critical software developers have largely resisted this trend because of concerns about verifiability of object-oriented systems. This paper outlines the benefits offered by object technology and considers the key features of the object-oriented approach from a user's

A high productivity tool for formally verified software development

It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless fo... more It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems unless formal methods are used. The challenge is to bring formal techniques up to date with modern object-oriented approaches to software design and to make their use as productive as informal methods. We believe that such a challenge can be met and we have developed the Escher Tool to demonstrate this. This paper describes some of the issues involved in marrying formal methods with an object-oriented approach, design decisions we took in developing a language for object-oriented specication and renement, and our results in applying the tool to small and large projects.

Perfect Developer: A tool for Object - Oriented Formal Specification and Refinement

Perfect Developer is a formal methods tool for developing specifications and refining them to cod... more Perfect Developer is a formal methods tool for developing specifications and refining them to code High productivity is achieved through the use of a push - button theorem prover using advanced au - tomated reasoning technology The tool can import UML models and generates final code in Java or C++ It is being used both commercially and for teaching

Can C++ be made as safe as SPARK?

ACM SIGAda Ada Letters, 2014

Escher Verification Studio Perfect Developer and Escher C Verifier

Formal Verification, 2012

Developing Reliable Software using Object-Oriented Formal Specification and Refinement (Extended abstract prepared 24 March 2003)

It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems un- less ... more It is our view that reliability cannot be guaranteed in large, complex software systems un- less formal methods are used. The challenge is to bring formal methods up to date with modern ob- ject-oriented techniques and make its use as productive as traditional methods. We believe that such a challenge can be met and we have developed the Escher Tool to demonstrate this. This paper de- scribes some of the issues involved in marrying formal methods with an object oriented approach, de- sign decisions we took in developing a language for object-oriented specification and refinement, and our results in applying the tool to small and large projects.

Perfect Developer: A tool for rigorous object-oriented software development