Strategies for Real-Time System Specification

Chapter 1. Overview

For more than a decade, there has been growing dissatisfaction with conventional strategies for systems development, and an increasing number of proposals for replacing them with new, more formal approaches. The problem is that conventional development methods cannot cope with the size and complexity of the systems we are now able to implement. These system characteristics are possible because of the ever-increasing capacity and capability of computer hardware. Systems having up to a million lines of high-order source code are already commonplace, and others are on the horizon that will require ten or more times that amount.

The inadequacies of the development methods were first apparent in large business and commercial systems, ...