Using abstract state machines to model a graphical user interface system

A graphical user interface (GUI) system is a visual tool for users to operate computer applications. In the software engineering world, verifying that the functions of a GUI system satisfy the perspective of users j.s one important goal. System modeling provides an opportunity to verify the functionality of the system before implementing it. In this thesis, we model the GUI system of the CoreASM language debugger based on the abstract state machine (ASM) paradigm, and give a formal specification to the GUI system. This GUI system model provides a formal mathematical foundation to specify the architecture and the function for:m of the GUI system and to specify the interactive actions between the users and the computer application (the CoreASM engine). The design approach in this work incorporates both object-oriented and task-oriented approaches. A process of level-wise refinement is used to solve particular design problems.