10.5 Formal methods and dependability
For more than 30 years, researchers have advocated the use of formal methods of software development. Formal methods are mathematical approaches to software development where you define a formal model of the software. You may then formally analyze this model to search for errors and inconsistencies, prove that a program is consistent with this model, or you may apply a series of correctness-preserving transformations to the model to generate a program. Abrial (Abrial 2009) claims that the use of formal methods can lead to “faultless systems,” although he is careful to limit what he means in this claim.
In an excellent survey, Woodcock et al. (Woodcock et al. 2009) discuss industrial applications where formal ...
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