5. Conclusion

The message about the need for functional specifications has been hammered home for many years in the field of automatic engineering, which covers everything to do with control systems. Users are familiar with this principle, but don't know how to put it into practice.

Initial experiments were conducted using SADT, SA-RT and certain object-oriented methods. These tools did not allow the creation of virtually operational models. In the eyes of the players most concerned, functional modeling ended up appearing as a somewhat gratuitous operation, detached from the down-to-earth context of programming. This is not what they expect. They want to be able to leverage the efforts made at the specification stage throughout the entire lifecycle.

This demand calls for a fairly fundamental reflection on the very nature of models and programs. To achieve...