Before Dezyne, there was Analytical Software Design: ASD. This article describes the origin of Dezyne’s verification technology.
Innovating and improving
Product innovation, quality and time to market are key elements in the battle to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. For a growing number of businesses, this means software development. Software is now an essential component embedded in an ever increasing array of products. It has become an important means of realising product innovation and is a key determinant of both product quality and time-to-market.
Embedded software and the questions that managers ask
Not only professional and industrial users depend heavily on embedded software components nowadays. The consumers are being confronted by products whose safe and reliable operation depends increasingly on embedded software. This trend raises new issues of consumer protection and product liability. At the same time, software development continues to suffer from poor predictability. Business managers want reliable answers to the questions “When will it be ready?”, “What will it cost?” and “How well will it work?”. But these are the very questions that software developers are least able to answer.
Existing development methods appear to have reached a quality ceiling that incremental improvements in process and technology are unlikely to breach. To break through this ceiling, a different approach is needed.
Using automatic verification
That’s where Verum’s Analytical Software Design (ASD) comes in. The business-critical software that is addressed in this paper is ‘untestable’. There is no amount of testing that can prove correctness and no economically feasible amount of testing that can establish a sufficient level of confidence that the software system is correct. That is why we should focus on defect prevention. ASD is a practical means of addressing the current difficulties. It provides a formal framework in which one can develop organised, accessible and concise specifications that are expressed in domain terms and have explicit traceability to the original informal requirements.
In this paper you will learn:
- about Verum’s ASD;
- how ASD marries software engineering mathematics developed in academia and practical software development methods developed in industry;
- how mathematically based techniques can be applied within existing software development organizations in a practical way;
- about the use of ASD in an industrial case.
Video presentation: Introducing Dezyne The ASD Suite in Perspective
Taken at Verum’s Community Meeting, this presentation introduces our new model driven software engineering tool, Dezyne. Dezyne is the successor to our previous product, the ASD:Suite. The presentation constrasts the two and reflects on the improvements made in Dezyne with respect to customer needs and experience.