A survey on formal, object-oriented program development approaches

Due to the popularity of object-oriented programming approaches, there is agrowing interest in utilizing object-oriented concepts, such as encapsulation and reuse, whenapplying formal methods. the main contribution of this paper is to review and compareexisting formal methods to develop object-oriented programs from formal specications.the secondary contribution is providing a comparison between widely used object-orientedformal specication languages. the results of this paper can be utilized by researcherswishing to know what open problems are outstanding in the areas of formal, objectorientedspecication and program development. our ndings are also useful for thosewho are looking for proper specication languages and program development methods tospecify and develop object-oriented programs formally. in addition, the provided criteriaare suitable for evaluating numerous object-oriented formal specication languages thatare under development, either by extending existing formal approaches or formalizinginformal oo-methods. as one consequence of this work, it can be mentioned that amongformal specication languages, oz and vdm++ support oo concepts more strongly incomparison to vdm++ and uml-b. program development methods based on oz haveless tool support. finally, most proposed methods for formal, object-oriented programdevelopment have been evaluated using only case studies, rather than employing formalapproaches.