High-level guidance for managers deploying formal methods in their organisation

Abstract

Developing complex critical software should require proper validation with regards to requirements as well as showing a high level of certainty on correctness of the resulting system. While formal methods (FM) have a large potential to address these two challenges, their current Industry adoption is still hampered by a number of hurdles of technical and organizational natures. Furthermore, many misconceptions (myths) about FM remain deeply anchored in Industry. To help to bring down these hurdles and myths, this paper presents evidence that FM can be successfully used in Industry. The evidence repository follows two strategy to present its content. First, a company-specific approach is used where success stories describe how a given company deployed FM in one or several of its development projects. Second, a more general approach identifies general questions of interest (FAQ) to many companies in various Industry sectors. Success stories and FAQs are made available using a public collaborative wiki-based website open to external contributions (http://www.fm4industry.org). © Springer-Verlag 2013.