Formal specification comprehension: the art of reading and writing z

Formal Methods have been developed to provide systematic and rigorous techniques for software development. They found their place in document-driven development processes as well as in the agile world. However, reading, understanding and working with a formal specification still turns out to be a real challenge. This paper tries to identify the underlying cause and argues that comprehensibility of a specification is one of the key factors. It presents some first findings of an extensive study investigating the readability of Z specifications and comes up with a set of recommendations in writing formal specifications so that the syntactic gap between the mathematics and the natural language requirements description can be bridged more easily.

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