Review of Kilov Behavioral Specifications of Businesses and Systems

Book Review: Behavioral Specifications of Businesses and Systems

Haim Kilov, Bernhard Rumpe, and Ian Simmonds (editors)
UK: £86.25
US: $125.00
Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1999
ISBN: 0-7923-8629-9 (boards)

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Other Reviews

This book is a delightful surprise -- eclectic, challenging, funny, provocative, and above all genuinely new.

There are lively contributions from Ian Graham and Roel Wieringa, discussions of UML and RM-ODP, algebra and formal logic, problems in writing specifications, architecture and requirements, scenarios and constraints, systems engineering and e-commerce, Lewis Carroll and Wittgenstein. And all in the context of making better business specifications.

The book is carefully and consistently formatted throughout its collection of 20 papers, and efficiently indexed.

Publisher's advertisement reads as follows:

"This text deals with the reading, writing and understanding of specifications. The papers presented in this book describe useful concepts and practices (in programming and in specifications) and solid underlying theory that is of interest and importance to those who deal with increased complexity of business and systems. Most concepts have been successfully used in actual industrial projects, while others are from the forefront of research. Authors include practitioners, business thinkers, academics and applied mathematicians. These papers address different aspects of a single problem - taming complexity. The text emphasizes simplicity in specifications without concentrating on particular methodologies, languages or tools. It shows how to handle complexity and how to succeed in understanding and specifying businesses and systems based upon abstract concepts. The text is the second volume of papers based on a series of workshops held alongside ACM's annual conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) and European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP). The first volume, Object-Oriented Behavioral Specifications, edited by Haim Kilov and William Harvey, was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1996."