Talk "New book: Formal Methods for Software Engineering"

by Markus Roggenbach

Sun, 28 March 2021 at 10:00 am in Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Joint work with: Antonio Cerone, Bernd-Holger Schlingloff, Gerardo Schneider, Siraj Ahmed Shaikh

Abstract: The 2020 white paper "Rooting Formal Methods within Higher Education Curricula for Computer Science and Software Engineering" makes the following propositions: (i) Current software engineering practices fail to deliver dependable software. (ii) Formal methods are capable of improving this situation, and are beneficial and cost-effective for mainstream software development. (iii) Education in formal methods is key to progress things. (iv) Education in formal methods needs to be transformed. With this textbook we hope to have helped improving this situation. In particular, we argue that Formal Methods have come out of the niche of safety critical applications, and that it is reasonable to apply them also in mainstream software development. For the academic teacher, our book offers an example driven approach for teaching the subject. It puts an emphasis on the application of Formal Methods, while still preserving mathematical rigour. The book describes a selected set of Formal Methods in one integrated setting. For students of software engineering, the book offers an accessible account to understand what Formal Methods are about. Studying this book should enable them to apply various Formal Methods to concrete software engineering challenges. As different Formal Methods share foundations, we hope that the material of this book will allow the reader to comprehend the essence of newly encountered Formal Methods. In the same spirit, we hope that studying our book may encourage the reader to undertake own research in Formal Methods for software engineering. In the talk, Holger Schlingloff and I will present the concept behind together with some sample excerpts. The book is due to appear at Springer: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030387990