TABULAR EXPRESSIONS,
TRACE ASSERTIONS AND FUNDAMENTALS OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Tabular expressions
introduced
by
David
Parnas
in early eighties of last century
have been used in software
industry for many years and their formal semantics has been proposed by
(Janicki 1985) and developed by (Janicki-Parnas-Zucker 1997,
Janicki-Khedri
2001, Kahl 2004,
Jin-Parnas 2010) and others. They are currently being used and developed at
McMaster by research teams of
Mark Lawford and
Alan Wassyng, but there are still
many open problems and unexplored avenues.
The trace assertion method is a formal state machine-based method for
specifying module interfaces by (Bartoussek-Parnas 1972). It was invented as an alternative
for algebraic specification, has been used quite successfully by
the
software
industry, and has solid theoretical foundations (Janicki-Sekerinski 2001,
Brzozowski-Jürgensen 2006,
Prowell-Poore 2003) and others. However,
dealing with
concurrency seems to be a weak point of current versions of trace assertions.
Both topics mentioned above are right now dormant, mainly due to involvement in
other research areas however,
they both can be renewed
quite easily, providing some graduate students would express some interest.
2014
I. Bourguiba, R. Janicki, Converting Software Cost Reduction Tables into
Tabular Expressions, Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference
Modelling and Simulation (AfricaMS 2014), September 1 - 3, 2014 Gaborone,
Botswana, pp. 74-80.
2011
V. Babiy,
R. Janicki, W. W. Koczkodaj, A. Wassyng, A context aware framework for
product based software certification,
Journal of Applied Computer Science 19,1 (2011), 7-32.
2010
V. Babiy,
A. D. Bogobowicz, R. Janicki, W. W. Koczkodaj, A. Wassyng, Selecting the
best strategy in a software certification process, Proc. of IMCSIT
(International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information
Technology), Vol. 5 (Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Applications),
pp. 53-58, Wisła, Poland, 2010.
2009
V. Babiy, R. Janicki, T. A. Jingco, T. Kakiashvili, W. W. Koczkodaj, M. Woodbury- Smith, Benefits of Using Tabular Expressions in Planning Health Services, Proc. of SERP’2009 (Software Engineering Research and Practice), Volume I, pp. 99-102, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2009, CSREA Press.
I. Bourguiba, R. Janicki, Tabular Expressions vs Software Cost Reduction, Proc. of SERP’2009 (Software Engineering Research and Practice), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2009.
I. Bourguiba, R. Janicki, Table-based Specification Techniques, Proc. of the 39th CIE’2009 (Computers and Industrial Engineering), Troyes, France, 2009.
2007
R. Janicki, Specifying Module Interfaces with Finitely Defined Automata, 11th
WSEAS Int. Conf. on Computers, pp. 108-113, Agios Nicolaos, Crete,
Greece 2007, WSEAS Press.
2005
R. Janicki, A. Wassyng, Tabular Expressions and Their Relational Semantics,
Fundamenta Informaticae 67, 4 (2005), 343-370.
2004
Y. Yang, R. Janicki, On Concurrency and Tabular Expressions, Proc. of
SERP’2004 (Software Engineering
Research and Practice), Las Vegas, USA, 2004, pp. 455 - 461.
2003
A. Wassyng, R. Janicki, Tabular Expressions in Software Engineering, Proc.
of ICSSEA’03 (Intern. Conf. on
Software and System Engineering), Vol. 4, Paris, France 2003, pp.1-46.
2002
R. Janicki, Formal Specification and Finitely Defined Automata with
Interpreted States, Proc. of SERP’2002
(Software Engineering Research and Practice), Las Vegas, USA, 2002, pp.
434-440.
2001
R. Janicki, E. Sekerinski, Foundations of the Trace Assertion Method of
Module Interface Specification,
IEEE Transactions on Software
Engineering, 27, 7 (2001)
577-598.
1997
R. Janicki, D. L. Parnas and J. Zucker, Tabular Representations, In C.
Brink and G. Schmidt (eds.)
Relational Methods in Computer Science,
Springer-Verlag, 1997, 184-196.
1995
R. Janicki, Towards a Formal Semantics of Parnas Tables,
Proc. of the 17th International
Conference on Software Engineering, Seattle, Washington, 1995, 231-240.