Related papers: More Programming Than Programming: Teaching Formal…

Formal methods yet advantageous, face challenges towards wide acceptance and adoption in software development practices. The major reason being presumed complexity. The issue can be addressed by academia with a thoughtful plan of teaching…

Formal verification of software is a bit of a niche activity: it is only applied to the most safety-critical or security-critical software and it is typically only performed by specialized verification engineers. This paper considers…

Formal verification techniques aim at formally proving the correctness of a computer program with respect to a formal specification, but the expertise and effort required for applying formal specification and verification techniques and…

Formal methods provide systematic and rigorous techniques for software development. We strongly believe that they must be taught in computer science curricula. In this paper we present the pedagogic rationale and the concrete implementation…

For many decades, formal methods are considered to be the way forward to help the software industry to make more reliable and trustworthy software. However, despite this strong belief and many individual success stories, no real change in…

Students often learn formal methods as part of a software engineering degree programme, without applying these formal methods outside of the specific module(s) dedicated to this subject. In particular, software engineering students often…

The quality of software produced by students is often poor. How to teach students to develop good quality software has long been a topic in computer science education and research. We must conclude that we still do not have a good answer to…

Development of formal proofs of correctness of programs can increase actual and perceived reliability and facilitate better understanding of program specifications and their underlying assumptions. Tools supporting such development have…

Formal Methods are mathematically-based techniques for software design and engineering, which enable the unambiguous description of and reasoning about a system's behaviour. Autonomous systems use software to make decisions without human…

This white paper argues that formal methods need to be better rooted in higher education curricula for computer science and software engineering programmes of study. To this end, it advocates (i) improved teaching of formal methods; (ii)…

The aim of the FESCA workshop is to bring together junior researchers from formal methods, software engineering, and industry interested in the development and application of formal modelling approaches as well as associated analysis and…

Students in computing education increasingly use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Yet, the role of LLMs in supporting cognitively demanding tasks, like deductive program verification, remains poorly understood. This paper…

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.…

Increased demands in the field of scientific computation require that algorithms be more efficiently implemented. Maintaining correctness in addition to efficiency is a challenge that software engineers in the field have to face. In this…

Formal methods were frequently shown to be effective and, perhaps because of that, practitioners are interested in using them more often. Still, these methods are far less applied than expected, particularly, in critical domains where they…

A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in…

Despite significant advancements in the conception of (formal) integrated development environments, applying formal methods in software industry is still perceived as a difficult task. To make the task easier, providing tools that help…

We review state-of-the-art formal methods applied to the emerging field of the verification of machine learning systems. Formal methods can provide rigorous correctness guarantees on hardware and software systems. Thanks to the availability…

While using formal methods offers advantages over unit testing, their steep learning curve can be daunting to developers and can be a major impediment to widespread adoption. To support integration into an industrial software engineering…

The aim of the FESCA workshop is to bring together both young and senior researchers from formal methods, software engineering, and industry interested in the development and application of formal modelling approaches as well as associated…