Formal methods in dependable systems engineering: a survey of professionals from Europe and North America
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Formal methods in dependable systems engineering: a survey of professionals from Europe and North America Mario Gleirscher1
· Diego Marmsoler2
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Context Formal methods (FMs) have been around for a while, still being unclear how to leverage their benefits, overcome their challenges, and set new directions for their improvement towards a more successful transfer into practice. Objective We study the use of formal methods in mission-critical software domains, examining industrial and academic views. Method We perform a cross-sectional on-line survey. Results Our results indicate an increased intent to apply FMs in industry, suggesting a positively perceived usefulness. But the results also indicate a negatively perceived ease of use. Scalability, skills, and education seem to be among the key challenges to support this intent. Conclusions We present the largest study of this kind so far (N = 216), and our observations provide valuable insights, highlighting directions for future theoretical and empirical research of formal methods. Our findings are strongly coherent with earlier observations by Austin and Graeme (1993). Keywords Formal methods · Empirical research · On-line survey · Usage · Usefulness · Practical challenges · Research transfer · Software engineering education & training
Acronyms CMMI DI EOU
Capability Maturity Model Integration respondents with decreased usage intent ease of use
Communicated by: H´el`ene Waeselynck Mario Gleirscher
[email protected] Diego Marmsoler [email protected] 1
Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK
2
Institut f¨ur Informatik, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany
Empirical Software Engineering
FM GQM HQ ICT II IS LE M MbE ME NP P PEOU PU RQ SE SMT TAM TLD NM UFM U
formal method goal-question-metric head quarter information and communication technology respondents with increased usage intent information system less experienced respondents respondents with some motivations to use FMs model-based engineering more experienced respondents non-practitioners practitioners perceived ease of use perceived usefulness research question software engineering satisfiability modulo theory technology acceptance model top-level domain respondents without any motivations to use FMs Use of FMs in mission critical SE usefulness
1 Motivation and Challenges Over the past decades, many software errors have been deployed in the field and some of these errors had a clearly intolerable impact.1 Cost savings from reducing such impact have been the motivation of (FMs) as a first-class approach to error prevention, detection, and removal (Holloway 1997). In university courses on software engineering, we learned that FMs are among the best we have to design and assure correct systems. The question “Why are FMs not used more widely?” (Knight et al. 1997) is hence more than justified. With a Twitter poll,2 which emerged from our coffee spot discussions, we solicited opinions on a timely paraphrase of a statement arg
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