A METHODOLOGY FOR DEVELOPING REQUIREMENT AND DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS FOR DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE SYSTEMS USING ATTRIBUTE GRAMMAR

Software design for distributed computing systems should be approached differently than centralized computing systems by system designers. In order to reach the best effect on software systems and the best utilization on distributed computing systems, the software systems running on distributed computing systems must be designed based on a software development methodology specially created for distributed software systems. So far very few distributed software systems are completed because of the field is relatively new and no complete software development methodology can be followed.;RSLAG (Requirement Specification Language based on Attribute Grammar) specification language is developed for specifying the software requirement and design work. The special properties in distributed computing systems (e.g. parallelism, concurrency, synchronization, communication) can be expressed by functional control nodes (templates) and interproductional execution control attributes. Communicational aspects in distributed software systems are investigated to have a set of general and capable representations to be used in various cases in communication. Graphical representations are designed to show the structural and procedural properties, data and control flows involved in system decomposition processes. An example is given to illustrate the development of requirement and design specifications for distributed software systems using DCSSD methodology.;DCSSD (Distributed Computing Software System Design) methodology uses two-stage developing process to obtain two types of requirement and design specifications for distributed software systems: user application oriented and software programming oriented. The first type of specifications is used by users and system designers together to have mutual understanding and agreement on the aspects of function and requirement that the software system will need to have. The second type of specifications is created based on the completed first type of specifications and toward software program execution. Attribute grammar is used as the theoretical basis for the methodology to formalize the specifications. It has the capability of providing the options to construct a software component specification.