Practical application of CSP and FDR to software design

Abstract

Most published material on CSP and the FDR tool is theoretical and mathematically rigorous, which can be daunting to the less mathematical software engineer. It is also often difficult to relate the elegant but abstract examples in the literature to the problems of the software engineer who must eventually produce an executable program expressed in a procedural programming language This paper outlines a number of techniques which may be used to model procedural designs in CSP and to structure the refinements so as to render them tractable to verification by the FDR model-checking tool. A simple example, taken from a recent IBM Software Services engagement, is used to illustrate some of the ideas presented in the paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.