Regular outsourcing of software development signifies a need for a common understanding between procurement specialists, project managers and software engineers of individual system requirements costs, to facilitate accord on price. Dependable cost estimates are usually required by customers long before detailed analysis and design activities would normally produce this information. A number of...

Trust management has received a lot of attention recently as it is an important component of decision making for electronic commerce, Internet interactions and electronic contract negotiation. However, appropriate tools are needed to effectively specify and manage trust relationships. They should facilitate the analysis of trust specification for conflicts and should enable information on risk ...

This project is devoted to the study of fundamental techniques used in the development of both algorithms and representations for the conversion of functional specifications to custom integrated circuit layout specifications. Included in this area are five major areas of investigation. These are the development of functional specification languages, the development and utilization of architectu...

Testing involves examining the behaviour of a system in order to discover potential faults. Determining the desired correct behaviour for a given input is called the “oracle problem”. Oracle automation is important to remove a current bottleneck which inhibits greater overall test automation; without oracle automation, the human has to determine whether observed behaviour is correct. The litera...

In this paper we review the main theoretical elements of behavioral subtyping in object-oriented programming languages in a semi-formal style that should allow software developers to understand better in which situations the Liskov substitution principle (objects of subclasses may stand for objects of superclasses) is violated. We then shortly discuss the specification of class contracts in beh...

During the development of software intensive systems, typically several models of this system are designed. These various models represent the system structured by different concerns, e. g. abstraction. While these approaches help to cope with complexity, the need of relating the models to one another arises. A major task is to keep model specifications consistent and traceable through special ...

The main goal of "Design by Contract" is to improve correctness and robustness of software systems. For this purpose, the interfaces of classes or modules are augmented with precise specifications containing assertions. By means of these assertions, a supplier of a service imposes contractual obligations that his clients have to fulfill. " Componentware " introduces a new software development p...

Convertible debt represents 10% of all USA debt yet despite its ubiquity it still posses difficult modelling challenges. This paper investigates alternative convertible bond model specifications. The work reviews the literature on convertible debt valuation especially the methodologies adopted by practitioners. Inadequacies in the historical and current valuation methods are highlighted. The di...

Feature-oriented programming is a paradigm to develop software product lines, in which products can be generated by composing feature modules. Design by contract is a development methodology, in which methods are specified by annotating them with contracts. Researchers propose to use such contracts to specify feature modules in order to perform different product-line analysis-techniques such as...

The main goal of "Design by Contract" is to improve correctness and robustness of software systems. For this purpose, the interfaces of classes or modules are augmented with precise specifications containing assertions. By means of these assertions, a supplier of a service imposes contractual obligations that his clients have to fulfill. ”Componentware” introduces a new software development par...