This paper makes me think of a personals ad: “Formal project seeks developer/user for a long-term relationship.” Briefly, it summarizes a ten-year open-source project, the Community Z Tools (CZT), that developed integrated Java tools to support specifications using the Z notation.

The Z notation is an elegant way to specify and refine functional requirements with mathematical rigor. The project started in 2001, with Andrew Martin describing a vision of a collection of tools that all shared a common core. They would provide editing, rendering, translation, type checking, proof checking, and Extensible Markup Language (XML). The tools would handle several dialects of Z. Martin’s theory was that better tools would make Z more popular. The paper’s screen shots make it clear how the Eclipse and jEdit plug-ins help developers.

By 2003, CZT was active on SourceForge.¿In 2007, statistics show the peak number of 5,000 downloads. The original plan has been achieved. However, in recent years, the rate of development has slowed. The graph of “commits” shows a decreasing rate of change.

This is a short and readable paper, but the listing of the dozen or so sub-projects is repetitive. I did not learn anything new about software development from this paper. Digging into the CZT project archives via Wikipedia, I did not find any use of Z within the CZT project. Why not? Didn’t they use Z? Or did they use it and hide the specifications?