Exploiting formality in software engineering

Abstract

There is undoubtedly a huge gap between the level of formality currently in use in mainstream software engineering and the “best practice” advocated by academics and practised by a small sector of industry involved in critical applications. This paper presents some results of recent research which are building bridges between these two approaches: on the one hand, developing formal methods which are useful to mainstream developers; and on the other, underpinning mainstream methods with formal foundations.