Spreadsheets can be viewed as programming languages for non-professional programmers. These so-called "end-user'' programmers vastly outnumber professional programmers creating millions of new spreadsheets every year. As a programming language, spreadsheets lack support for abstraction, testing, encapsulation, or structured programming. As a result, and as numerous studies have shown, the high rate of production is accompanied by an alarming high rate of errors. Some studies report that up to 90% of real-world spreadsheets contain errors. After their initial creation, many spreadsheets turn out to be used for storing and processing increasing amounts of data and supporting increasing numbers of users over long periods of time, making them complicated systems.
An emerging solution to handle the complex and evolving software systems is Model-driven Engineering (MDE). To consider models as first class entities and any software artifact as a model or a model element is one of the basic principles of MDE.
We adopted some techniques from MDE to solve spreadsheet problems. Most spreadsheets (if not all) lack a proper specification or a model. Using reverse engineering techniques we are able to derive various models from legacy spreadsheets. We use functional dependencies (a formalism that allow us to define how some column values depend on other column values) as building blocks for these models. Models can be used for several spreadsheet improvements, namely refactoring, safe evolution, migration or even generation of edit assistance. The techniques presented in this work are available under the framework HAEXCEL that we developed. It is composed of online and batch tools, reusable HASKELL libraries and OpenOffice.org extensions.
A study with several end-users was organized to survey the impact of the techniques we designed. The results of this study indicate that the models can bring great benefits to spreadsheet engineering helping users to commit fewer errors and to work faster.

The use of mathematical methods in the development of software is essential when reliable systems are sought; in particular they are now strongly recommended by the official norms adopted in the production of critical software. Program Verification is the area of computer science that studies mathematical methods for checking that a program conforms to its specification. This text is a self-contained introduction to program verification using logic-based methods, presented in the broader context of formal methods for software engineering. The idea of specifying the behaviour of individual software components by attaching contracts to them is now a widely followed approach in program development, which has given rise notably to the development of a number of behavioural interface specification languages and program verification tools. A foundation for the static verification of programs based on contract-annotated routines is laid out in the book. These can be independently verified, which provides a modular approach to the verification of software. The text assumes only basic knowledge of standard mathematical concepts that should be familiar to any computer science student. It includes a self-contained introduction to propositional logic and first-order reasoning with theories, followed by a study of program verification that combines theoretical and practical aspects -- from a program logic (a variant of Hoare logic for programs containing user-provided annotations) to the use of a realistic tool for the verification of C programs (annotated using the ACSL specification language), through the generation of verification conditions and the static verification of runtime errors.

Fieldbus technology has long been recognised as the future in industrial control applications. This book is intended for those wishing to embark on implementing CANopen protocols in their products, system integrators and for those planning to do pre-conformance testing of their products before pursuing a certification authority.This book describes the application of CAN, the CANopen protocol and communication technology at the shop floor level.

The chapter explores a layered approach to the analysis of the Nuclear Power Plant Control System described in Chapter 4. A model is specified to allow the analysis of use-centred properties based on generic templates. User interface properties include: the visibility of state attributes, the clarity of the mode structure and the ease with which an action can be recovered from. Property templates are used as heuristics to ease the construction of requirements for the control system interface.

Architectural (bad) smells are design decisions found in software architectures that degrade the ability of systems to evolve. This paper presents an approach to verify that a software architecture is smell-free using the Archery architectural description language. The language provides a core for modelling software architectures and an extension for specifying constraints. The approach consists in precisely specifying architectural smells as constraints, and then verifying that software architectures do not satisfy any of them. The constraint language is based on a propositional modal logic with recursion that includes: a converse operator for relations among architectural concepts, graded modalities for describing the cardinality in such relations, and nominals referencing architectural elements. Four architectural smells illustrate the approach.