Formal concept analysis applications to requirements engineering and design

Currently, the bulk of applications of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) in software engineering have focussed on software maintenance and re-engineering. In this thesis we broaden the approach by applying FCA to a number of early-phase activities within the software engineering life-cycle. With respect to the requirements engineering phase, a case study is presented comparing two class hierarchies that model aspects of a mass-transit railway ticketing system. The first hierarchy was produced for an existing Object-Z specification of the system while the second was derived using FCA. Contrasting the two hierarchies revealed that they were essentially the same, however, the differences highlighted specification artefacts in the existing hierarchy. With respect to the design phase, the thesis discusses the use of FCA for the navigation and visualisation of Formal Specifications written in Z. In response to the continued call for formal methods tool support, we implement and explore a prototype specification browser that exploits the abstractions afforded by FCA. The research hypothesis is an integrated architecture for navigating formal specifications using FCA. This architecture is realised using ZML and ToscanaJ to produce a practical research tool. The thesis also includes the first broad survey of FCA in the domain of software engineering and an FCA-based methodology for surveying academic literature in general.

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