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Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice? (2024)
week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 (watch the video or check out the slides). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice.
By saving on the cost of rework, and by getting interface changes out of the way earlier, formal design work can significantly increase the speed and efficiency of the software building process. Or, at least, a large enough subset of well understood static requirements that upfront formal design reduces rework and bug density during the implementation phase (and after, when the system is in production) considerably. But I am sure that my university SE class experience of describing 100 lines of code in 100 reams of UML left me with an unreasonably low opinion of the benefits of designing software.
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