The industrial use of formal methods: was Darwin right?

Even though the use of formal methods in industry has been documented in numerous case studies, scepticism about their usefulness remains widespread. However, formalisms have evolved rapidly over the last decade and are doing a much better job of meeting the needs of industry. This paper briefly describes several of the experiments in formal methods that have been conducted at Rockwell Collins and attempts to pull these observations together into a profile of what industry needs from the research community