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[Himesh]

Check these links to know more on Formal Methods:

What is Formal Methods?

Seven Myths of Formal Methods

regards,
Himesh

[semigeezer]

If your comapny is going down that path, you have my deepest sympathies. Been there. Done that. If you are lucky, your upper management will read some other airline magazine tomorrow and you can move on to a new bone headed initiative.

[Himesh]

[semigeezer]

Well, there was a huge effort to educate all programmers in the use of CASE and similar techniques, including theory of algorithm proofs, etc. As a result, there was a huge infrastructure built up to provide education, reschedule work because of the amount of time people were to be in class (basically the company lost a couple of weeks for every programmer, plus the time it took to make up the lost time), caused morale to plummet and people to loose respect for their 'leaders', and in the end, the techniques were never used by anyone because, contrary to the article, they simply are not relevant to 'real world' situations. They may be OK for brand new projects, but when you have hundreds of millions of existing lines of code, some dating back 30 years or more, well lets say that the benefits of the techniques don't outweigh even the education costs, let alone the implementaiton costs. Not to mention that that simply isn't how programmers work.

It may be that the use of such techniques could be used to aid compiler design, program design and analysis tools and other automated systems, but the average programmer will find a new job before resorting to that level of trivia and minutia.

[CaptBill]

I too have been down that path. After about two years, the company I worked for at the time gave it up for the same reasons.

And then again, maybe semigeezer and I worked for the same company.

I live and work in Southern California.