Abstract
Formal methods have had considerable success in developing the theoretical fundamentals of many areas of computing, but have had considerably less success at penetrating the areas where those formal techniques could be applied. This can be regarded as a failure of formal methods. This paper is concerned, in particular, with the lack of impact of formal techniques on software development, and especially on software development curricula. The paper presents some diagnoses of the cause of the problem and discusses attempts at integration of formal development into a Software Engineering program.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abrial, J.-R.: The B-Book: Assigning Programs to Meanings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1996)
UNSW B Resource Site, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/b@unsw
ORA Canada. Z/EVES Z proof assistant, http://www.ora.on.ca/z-eves/welcome.html
COMP2110. Software System Specification, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs2110
COMP2111. System Modelling and Development, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs2111
The Joint Task force on Computing Curricula IEEE Computer Society and ACM. Computing curriculum – software engineering. Technical report, IEEE Computer Society & ACM (2004), http://sites.computer.org/ccse/volume/Draft3.1-2-6-04.pdf
Jia, X.: Ztc: Z type checker, http://se.cs.depaul.edu/fm/ztc.html
King, S.: Z and the refinement calculus. In: Bjørner, D., Hoare, C.A.R., Langmaack, H. (eds.) VDM 1990. LNCS, vol. 428, pp. 164–188. Springer, Heidelberg (1990)
Leuschel, M.: ProB, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mal/systems/prob.html
B-Core(UK) Ltd. B Toolkit, http://www.b-core.com
Robinson, K.A.: Refining Z specifications to programs. In: Australian Software Engineering Conference, May 1987. I.E.Aust, pp. 87–97 (1987)
Robinson, K.: Early experiences in teaching the B-Method. pp. 291–296, Universite de Nantes, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Nantes (November 1996)
Robinson, K., Ho, P., Schwenke, M.: To Zed and back: Integrating data flow diagrams and Z, July 1996, pp. 127–134. ACM Press, New York (1996)
Schneider, S.: The B-Method: An Introduction. Palgrave, Oxford (2001)
Sekerinski, E., Sere, K. (eds.): Program Development by Refinement, FACIT. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
SENG2010. Software Engineering Workshop 2A, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~se2010
SENG2020. Software Engineering Workshop 2B, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~se2020
Snook, C.: U2B, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~cfs/
Steria, Atelier, B.: http://www.atelierb.societe.com/
UNSW. Software Engineering Program, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/seng
Wordsworth, J.B.: Software Engineering with the B-Method. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Robinson, K. (2004). Embedding Formal Development in Software Engineering. In: Dean, C.N., Boute, R.T. (eds) Teaching Formal Methods. TFM 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3294. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30472-2_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30472-2_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23611-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-30472-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive