Tool Support for Production Use of Formal Techniques

The relatively scant use of formal techniques in software development is the result, in part, of a lack of suitable support tools. Many tools have been developed that provide novel analysis capabilities but lack basic yet commonplace facilities which are essential in production software development. More importantly, many existing tools for the development of formal specifications fail to provide mechanisms for the manipulation of natural language despite the fact that natural language is essential to give meaning to the terms in the formal specification. In this paper, we describe a toolset that has been developed with the specific intent of providing comprehensive facilities for creating formal specifications in production software development. The toolset supports a powerful formal notation, Z, but also provides comprehensive and fully integrated support for natural language. As well as describing the toolset we present a preliminary evaluation of its use on a commercial specification.