• DocumentCode
    637324
  • Title

    Though this be madness, yet there is method in it? (Keynote)

  • Author

    Wassyng, Alan

  • Author_Institution
    McMaster Centre for Software Certification, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, ON, Canada
  • fYear
    2013
  • fDate
    25-25 May 2013
  • Firstpage
    1
  • Lastpage
    7
  • Abstract
    After decades of research, and despite significant advancement, formal methods are still not widely used in industrial software development. Industry practitioners believe that the methods and tools coming out of academia are, to a large extent, irrelevant and ineffective in tackling real-life projects. They are difficult to use, esoteric, and do not scale (at all). This paper reflects more than twenty years spent in first experiencing the problems in industry, and then struggling to do something about it in academia. We present some examples of formal method madness/blindness, as well as a few successes. We believe the problem is deep. To start to address it and make progress in producing methods that are truly usable in industry, and rigorous enough to make them effective engineering methods, we need to reconsider the role of computer scientists, software engineers, software developers, as well as the hurdles to promotion for academics. Along the way, the paper will present a few fundamental principles that we think spell the difference between success and failure in producing usable formal methods, and convincing software professionals in industry to adopt them.
  • Keywords
    formal specification; computer scientists; engineering methods; formal methods; industrial software development; industry practitioners; software developers; software engineers; software professionals; Communities; Computer science; Computers; Industries; Mathematics; Software; Software engineering;
  • fLanguage
    English
  • Publisher
    ieee
  • Conference_Titel
    Formal Methods in Software Engineering (FormaliSE), 2013 1st FME Workshop on
  • Conference_Location
    San Francisco, CA
  • Type

    conf

  • DOI
    10.1109/FormaliSE.2013.6612270
  • Filename
    6612270