A Family of Mathematical Methods for Professional Software Documentation

The movement to integrate mathematically based software development methods is a predictable response to the fact that none of the many methods available seems sufficient to do the whole job (whatever that may be) on its own. This talk argues that integrating separately developed methods is not the most fruitful possible approach. Instead we propose a family of methods, based on a common model, designed to be complementary and mutually supportive.The method family being developed at the Software Quality Research Lab at the University of Limerick is characterised by two major decisions:– Software developers must prepare and maintain a set of documents whose content (not format) is specified by the relational model presented in [3].– The relations are represented using mathematical expressions in tabular form. [5].This talk will motivate these decisions, describe the model, illustrate the concept of tabular expressions, and discuss the uses of such documents in software development.