Foreword


I have spent my career writing business enterprise software, but I can foresee the day when application software will no longer be written by programmers like myself. For more than twenty years, my advanced development team and I have been working on realizing the Holy Grail of programmingspecification-based software. This is application software generated automatically from a very precise specification written by a domain expert rather than a system analyst or a programmer. Today's business application programmers will become either domain experts or the system programmers who create the metacompilers for the specification languages or Domain-Specific Design Languages (DSDLs) that will automatically generate full application systems. After years of research, we at Lawson have announced such a tool, called Landmark™, which is being used to prepare our new application software releases.

It is impossible to automate any process that cannot be done manually in a reliable and repeatable way. The unfortunate reliability situation with computer software historically has retarded its automation for years. The sort-merge generator is more than fifty years old, but this achievement has not been repeated for more-complex applications. It is one thing to write a precise, unambiguous specification for a sort-merge program and quite another to write one for even a piece of an HR or supply/chain application. The first problem is to develop a specification language that has the unambiguous expressive power to do for any application what a sort-merge specification does for its application. Considerable progress has been made with this issue in recent years with the advent of Pattern Languages and the DSDLs that implement them. The second problem is understanding the software development process in a prescriptive rather than a merely descriptive way. The five design technologies described and presented in both theory and example in this book are one of the first attempts to do that with software. They are tried and tested in the hardware manufacturing process and product design but have yet to be applied to software development in any systematic way. This book represents a first attempt to do so, as a combined primer and handbook. The fact that this book incorporates as a case study almost every published example of the application of these design technologies to software design and development identifies it as a pioneering work.

I agree with the authors that the future of business application software lies in specification-based languages. I also think that their book will be a bridge from today's untrustworthy, manually created software to tomorrow's automatically generated, fully trustworthy software. I recommend this book very highly.

H. Richard Lawson

Vice Chairman, Lawson Software




Design for Trustworthy Software. Tools, Techniques, and Methodology of Developing Robust Software
Design for Trustworthy Software: Tools, Techniques, and Methodology of Developing Robust Software
ISBN: 0131872508
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 394

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