Abstraction-Based Software Development

At the university of Minnesota an interdisciplinary team has been developing and running an ongoing course sequence in software engineering. The project served the dual purpose of giving the students some experience in applying the theory of software engineering to problems large enough to require a group effort, and at the same time enabling the development team to evaluate the effectiveness of the concepts and tools used. In this article the authors report on their experience with these concepts and tools, concentrating on the software- engineering rather than training and technology transfer aspects of the process