Formal Methods, the Very Idea, Some
Thoughts
Daniel M. Berry
Abstract
The talk defines formal methods (FMs)
and describes economic issues involved in their application. From these
considerations and the concepts implicit in ``No Silver Bullet'', it becomes
clear that FMs are best applied during requirements
engineering. A theory of why formal methods work when they work is offered and
it is suggested that FMs help the most when the
applier is most ignorant about the problem domain.
The talk should be controversial and fun!
Bio
Daniel M. Berry got his
B.S. in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, Troy, New York, USA in 1969 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science
from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island,
USA in 1974. He was on the faculty of the Computer
Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, California,
USA from 1972 until 1987. He was in the Computer Science Faculty at the Technion, Haifa, Israel from 1987 until 1999. From 1990
until 1994, he worked for half of each year at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie
Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, where he was part of a
group that built CMU's
Master of Software Engineering program. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he visited the Computer
Systems Group at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
In 1999,