Improving the reusability of program specification through data flow modeling

We performed a domain analysis for the data-intensive business systems. A large amount of commonly used database retrievals and computational functions were found to he repeatedly specified in the process of specifying programs in this domain. In this paper, a program specification technique called the data derivation (DD) specification technique is proposed to improve the reuse of program specifications in this domain. In this technique, we use the object-oriented approach augmented with attribute propagation, and a set of predefined generic components for forming an object model. A program is specified through modeling its effects. The commonly used database retrievals are incorporated into the predefined generic components. The commonly used computational functions are stored in a user definable library and can be incorporated into the generic components as and when needed