Anna Ingólfsdóttir has been having a lively academic discussion about the usefulness of formal approaches in software development with software engineering people at the University of Iceland, notably Oddur Benediktsson. Oddur claimed that formal methods are useless, and that nobody in industry uses them.
Of course, Anna had to raise to the challenge, and I helped her find counter-arguments a little. In the process, we discovered the article NASA's Mission Reliable by Patrick Regan and Scott Hamilton (IEEE Computer). It is an excellent advertisement for topics that are close to the heart of concurrency theorists, and keywords like model checking, static analysis and good old compositional reasoning figure prominently in it. I warmly recommend it to all of you, also for distribution to our students. Other useful links may be found here, and I hope to add more in due course. Your suggestions are most welcome!
In passing, it was good to read about Klaus Havelund's successes at NASA. He is an old pal of ours from his Aalborg days. Well done, Klaus!
Last modified: Wednesday, 10-Nov-2004 15:44:04 CET.