Declaration

I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the program of study leading to the award of M.Sc. in Computer Science, is entirely my own work and has not been taken from the work of others- save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Signed: Date: ii This thesis aims to improve software quality by extending the support for formal software construction. By formal software construction is meant a process through which software is developed that is provably free from errors. In particular, the thesis provides a critical analysis of the software development tool Perfect Developer with respect to its support of the software construction process. In doing so, the thesis discusses the development of algebraic- and model-oriented specifications into object-oriented programs through refinement. These discussions result in the generation of a set of recommendations for an improved software construction tool. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my mother, June, and my brother, David, for their support and encouragement during the preparation of this thesis. Without them I would have had many more difficulties and much less hair. Many thanks go to my supervisor Rosemary Monahan for her continued patience and understanding. She always made herself available when I encountered dead ends and always furthered progress. Special thanks go to Prof. Joseph M. Morris for his seemingly limitless knowledge. His guidance with the presentation of this thesis was invaluable and I daresay I would not have learned as much as I did without his input. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Liz Riley, for her love and comfort during this time