A case study in innovative process improvement: code synthesis from formalspecifications

Traditional approaches to Software Process Improvement focus on measurement and evolutionary change within the established Software Process. This appr oach is attractive because it has fairly low risk but has high measurement cost, and limited potential benefit because of the concentration on evoluti on. At Lucas Varity we are piloting an approach to Process Improvement that focuses on deploying innovative research directed to improving productivit y and maintaining or improving the existing high product quality. This appr oach appears to offer significantly greater gains in productivity but requi res a new approach to Process Improvement. The main elements are: A commitment to long-term strategic research to identify product related in novations within the company to acquire new technology and members of staff able to pioneer innovations. A commitment to medium-term research in the form of carefully controlled Pr ocess Improvement Experiments that are oriented to providing quantitative e valuation of proposed innovations. The development of staff capability in Design Process Reengineering to prov ide the basis for Process Improvement experimentation. We provide an overview of our approach to Design Process Reengineering and illustrate it by describing an ongoing experiment in the deployment of form al methods tools developed to support hardware design used in the design of safety-critical software. Preliminary results indicate that the use of suc h methods offer considerable advantages over conventional approaches. (C) 1 999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.