Abstract
In this paper, we report the author’s experience teaching formal methods to undergraduate students in the fourth year of the Software Engineering degree at the University of Málaga. The subject is divided into three blocks devoted to explaining the application of formal methods at different abstraction levels during the process of developing software. Although we teach the theoretical basis for students to understand the techniques, we mainly focus on the practical application of formal methods. Students are asked to realize in pairs three modelling and specifying projects of medium size (one for each block). The practical work corresponds to \(60 \%\) of the student assessment, the remaining \(40 \%\) is assessed with an exam on the theory of the subject matter. We have been teaching the subject during the last five years with very good results.
This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities project RTI2018-099777-B-I00 and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 815178 (5GENESIS).
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Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Dr. Francisco Durán and Dr. José María Álvarez for their help in designing the form and content of the course.
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Gallardo, MdM., Panizo, L. (2019). Teaching Formal Methods: From Software in the Small to Software in the Large. In: Dongol, B., Petre, L., Smith, G. (eds) Formal Methods Teaching. FMTea 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11758. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32441-4_7
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