From design to automatic coding and testing: The SPACES project

If someone could invent a powerful machine connected to brains of customer and computer system's designer and aiming at producing the right system with the right properties at the right cost, he will certainly become quickly the richest man of the world. But this machine does not currently exist and the path from user needs to validated system is still made of sharp stones which are there to slow down any software project. Nevertheless, much progress can be made by using the appropriate technologies, tools and processes with the ambitious goals of understanding user requirements, communicating on the proposed solution, developing it with the right schedule and costs, and be always able, at any stage, to demonstrate its adequacy to the needs. Here, at Matra Marconi Space, in the On-board SW division, we have demonstrated the great interest of using formal techniques such as SDL for developing SW. We are now at die point where a complete process can be established covering most of the stages from capture of user requirements to validation through coding and testing. Following the DDV and VTC experiments, which have been presented at DASIA in 96 and 98. this paper describes the SPACES project of the ESSI program where code and tests generation techniques from a SDL model have been experimented on an industrial project. At the time this paper is presented, the SPACES project is still on-going and only some results on code generation are available. Nevertheless, they already show that such techniques are really promising and can be used without any difficulties to satisfy the "continuous prototyping" development concept.