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Formal software specification is known to enable early error detection and explicit invariants, yet it has seen limited industrial adoption due to its high notation overhead and the expertise required to use traditional formal languages.…

There are many benefits in providing formal specifications for our software. However, teaching students to do this is not always easy as courses on formal methods are often experienced as dry by students. This paper presents a game called…

Formal methods for software correctness are critical to the future of software engineering - and so must be an essential part of software engineering education. Unfortunately, formal methods are often resisted by students due to perceived…

The problem of writing a specification which accurately reflects the intent of the developer has long been recognized as fundamental. We propose a method and a supporting tool to write and check a specification and an implementation using a…

Testing has become an indispensable activity of software development, yet writing good and relevant tests remains a quite challenging task. One well-known problem is that it often is impossible or unrealistic to test for every outcome, as…

Effective software testing is critical for producing reliable and secure software, yet many computer science students struggle to master the foundational concepts required to construct comprehensive test suites. While automated feedback…

Many software developments projects fail due to quality problems. Software testing enables the creation of high quality software products. Since it is a cumbersome and expensive task, and often hard to manage, both its technical background…

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…

While functional programming is an efficient way to express complex software, functional programming languages have a steep learning curve. Haskell can be challenging to learn for students who were only introduced to imperative programming.…

Experience with lightweight formal methods suggests that programmers are willing to write specification if it brings tangible benefits to their usual development activities. This paper considers stronger specifications and studies whether…

Safety and assurance standards often rely on the principle that requirements errors can be minimised by expressing the requirements more formally. Although numerous case studies have shown that the act of formalising previously informal…

Test suites assess natural language processing models' performance on specific functionalities: cases of interest involving model robustness, fairness, or particular linguistic capabilities. This paper introduces specification instructions:…

An introductory formal languages course exposes advanced undergraduate and early graduate students to automata theory, grammars, constructive proofs, computability, and decidability. Programming students find these topics to be challenging…

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…

The paper presents the second part of a precise description of the prototype that has been developed in the course of the ISAC project over the last two decades. This part describes the "specify-phase", while the first part describing the…

As software systems become more complex, modern software development requires more attention to human perspectives, and active participation of development teams in requirements elicitation tasks. In this context, incomplete or ambiguous…

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…

Programs are a kind of communication to both computers and people, hence as students are trained to write programs they need to learn to write well-designed, readable code rather than code that simply functions correctly. The difficulty in…

Correctness is one of the more important criteria of qualitative software. However, it is often taught in isolation and most students consider it only as an afterthought. They also do not receive sufficient feedback on code quality and…

Formal specifications have numerous benefits for both designers and users of network protocols. They provide clear, unambiguous representations, which are useful as documentation and for testing. They can help reveal disagreements about…