Development by formal stepwise refinement offers a guarantee that an implementation satisfies a specification. But refinement is frequently defined in such a restrictive way as to disallow some useful development steps. Here we de- fine feature refinement to overcome some limitations of re- finement and show its usefulness by applying it to examples taken from the literature.

Using partial relations as a canonical state-based semantics and labelled transition systems as a canonical event-based semantics, we degine functions formally linking the state- and event-based operational semantics. We can then use this link to move notions of refinement between the event- and state-based worlds.

An advantage of this abstract approach is that it is not restricted to a specific syntax or even a specific interpretation of the operational semantics