Software synthesis: The FAST process

A current trend in manufacturing is to design the manufacturing process and the product concurrently. The goal is to make the product easy to produce by the manufacturing process. Although software is not manufactured, the techniques needed to achieve the goal of easily producible software exist. Just as with manufacturing, the problem is how to organize the software production process and the products to eliminate rework. One solution lies in viewing system production as creating different members of a family, rather than creating a new system each time requirements change. Key to the process is finding the appropriate abstractions for the family, creating a language for describing them, and then translating descriptions of family members into deliverable software. The family-oriented, abstraction, specification, and translation (FAST) process is a systematic process for doing so. The goal is to create processes for rapidly creating different members of a program family. 1 Family-Oriented Software Production A current trend in manufacturing is to design the manufacturing process and the product concurrently. The goal is to make the product easy to produce by the manufacturing pro-cess. Although software is not manufactured, the techniques needed to achieve the goal o