Harnessing Theories for Tool Support

Abstract

Software development tools need to support more and more phases of the entire development process, because applications must be developed more correctly and efficiently. The tools therefore need to integrate sophisticated checkers, generators and transformations. A feasible approach to ensure high quality of such add-ins is to base them on sound formal foundations. In order to know where such add-ins will fit, we investigate the use of an existing successful commercial tool and identify suitable places for adding formally supported checking, transformation and generation modules. The paper concludes with a discussion of feasibility of developing the proposed add-ins and how to give conditions such that they will actually be used.