A Case Study in Developing Reliable Software: The Construction of a Buffer Management System Used in Network Communication

Abstract

An industrial application will show the usefulness of a newer method for constructing reliable software. The method combines the phases of design and implementation of software production. Formulation and description of a problem, independent of its implementation, are possible. Relative to given consistency attributes of a problem, the correctness of a specified solution can be shown independent of its implementation. The correctness of the implementation relative to the specification can be shown by using a representationfunction which describes the relation between implementation and specification. The industrial application which will be presented later will point out that the method contributes to a simple and therefore clear system structure. The reflections necessary for the specification were leading to an efficient implementation. Error statistics which were prepared during problem solving indicate that the application of the method reduced errors to a high degree. Especially design errors were detected in an early stage.