SE curriculum design: methodologies, formal methods, and life cycle models. II. Formal methods

Over recent years the use of formal methods in industry has greatly increased. Formal methods are defined as any method that allows you to reason about a problem, and which provides a logical (mathematical) way of proving the correctness of the proposed solution. Software engineers need competency in managing programming in the large. It is important to know all the methods, when they should be applied and when they should not. The difficult question for the software engineering educator is: when and how should these formal methods be taught in the curriculum?