The Role of Executable Abstract Programs in Software Development and Documentation

TL;DR

This paper advocates for the use of Executable Abstract Programs in software development and documentation, emphasizing their role in improving understanding, reliability, and maintenance of complex systems.

Contribution

It introduces Executable Abstract Programs as a formal, executable documentation method that integrates seamlessly into software development workflows for better design justification and system clarity.

Findings

Enhances understanding of system design through executable documentation

Improves system reliability and resilience via formal behavioral definitions

Reduces maintenance costs by facilitating reuse and change management

Abstract

We present Executable Abstract Programs and analyse their role for software development and documentation. The intuitive understanding of these programs fits the computational mindset of software system engineers and is supported by a simple but precise behavioural definition. Therefore, they can be smoothly integrated in the practitioner's daily work to rigorously formulate every design and implementation decision taken on the path from the Executable Abstract Program for the requirements to the targeted and efficiently runnable code. The Executable Abstract Programs of the resulting system documentation represent definitions of implementation steps one can check and justify by testing (due to their executable character) or by reasoning (due to the mathematical definition of their behaviour). For complex systems the implementation involves multiple (orthogonal or successive) implementation steps which represent instances of a practical computational refinement concept. Such a system development process is driven by computational refinements and is strictly limited to explicitly formulate and justify -- besides the requirements -- only the necessary implementation steps. As a consequence, it produces as side-effect a corpus of documentation that facilitates the understandability of the final code and improves its reliability and resilience; it also enhances the maintenance process (including reuse and change of abstract programs and code) and reduces maintenance cost.