Letter from the guest editors

Maldonado, José Carlos; Masiero, Paulo Cesar

doi:10.1590/S0104-65001998000200001

Letter from the guest editors

José Carlos Maldonado

Paulo Cesar Masiero

Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação

Universidade de São Paulo

This special issue on software engineering has attracted the interest of authors from various parts of the world materialized in nineteen submissions, four of which have been selected for publication. Each paper submitted has been reviewed by three referees widely known in the field of software engineering.

We are grateful to their relevant contribution to this special issue

Two of the selected papers adopt a theoretical approach, discussing issues related to formal specifications, formal methods, software development and modularity. The third one discusses the integration of formal methods and object-oriented methods, and the fourth one exhibits a practical interest on tool integration.

The paper by Cavalcanti, Sampaio and Woodcock presents refinement laws for the development of procedures in the Morgan's style, which are derived from the Back's formalism. Their refinement laws support the development technique proposed by Morgan and formalize all the examples presented by him. The authors expect them to be applicable to most of the examples found in practice.

Veloso, Veloso and Fiadeiro tackle the problem of developing families of software versions arising frequently on configuration management of databases and libraries of components. They generalize the concept of implementation developed for single implementations to families of specifications tagged by labels. They also show that the categories of such families have pushouts and that their formalization preserve conservative extensions.

Finally, the paper by Araújo Jr. and Sawyer proposes an approach to integrate object-oriented analysis and formal specification. A prototype supporting tool is also presented. The method and its supporting tool are called Metamorphosis. They use OMT and Object-Z to illustrate their proposal which could also be instantiated to other methods.

The paper of Yang and Han discusses the issues of tool integration focusing mainly on control and data integration. They present a classification scheme that is useful to guide the design and selection of tool integration mechanisms. They also compare and report experiments on a variety of integration techniques.

Concluding, on behalf of the Brazilian Computer Society we would like to thank the authors for their submissions and contributions to this special issue on Software Engineering of the Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society.