Abstract
Formal methods have offered great benefitts, but often at a heavy price. For everyday software development, in which the pressures of the market don’t allow full-scale formal methods to be applied, a more lightweight approach is called for. I’ll outline an approach that is designed to provide immediate benefit at relatively low cost. Its elements are a small and succinct modelling language, and a fully automatic anal- ysis scheme that can perform simulations and find errors. I’ll describe some recent case studies using this approach, involving naming schemes, architectural styles, and protocols for networks with changing topologies. I’ll make some controversial claims about this approach and its relationship to UML and traditional formal specification approaches, and I’ll barbeque some sacred cows, such as the belief that executability compromises abstraction.
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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Jackson, D. (2001). Lightweight Formal Methods. In: Oliveira, J.N., Zave, P. (eds) FME 2001: Formal Methods for Increasing Software Productivity. FME 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2021. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45251-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45251-6_1
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