Context
Formal methods (FMs) have been around for a while, still being unclear how to leverage their benefits, overcome their challenges, and set new directions for their improvement towards a more successful transfer into practice.
Objective
We study the use of formal methods in mission-critical software domains, examining industrial and academic views.
Method
We perform a cross-sectional on-line survey.
Results
Our results indicate an increased intent to apply FMs in industry, suggesting a positively perceived usefulness. But the results also indicate a negatively perceived ease of use. Scalability, skills, and education seem to be among the key challenges to support this intent.
Conclusions
We present the largest study of this kind so far (N = 216), and our observations provide valuable insights, highlighting directions for future theoretical and empirical research of formal methods. Our findings are strongly coherent with earlier observations by Austin and Graeme (1993).
The architecture of a system describes the system's overall organization into components and connections between those components. With the emergence of mobile computing, dynamic architectures became increasingly important. In such architectures, components may appear or disappear, and connections may change over time. Despite the growing importance of dynamic architectures, the specification of properties for those architectures remains a challenge. To address this problem, we introduce the notion of configuration traces to model properties of dynamic architectures. Then, we characterize activation, connection, and behavior properties as special sets of configuration traces. We then show soundness and relative completeness of our characterization, i.e., we show that the intersection of an activation, connection, and behavior property contains all relevant configuration traces and that (almost) every property can be separated into these classes. Configuration traces can be used to specify general properties of dynamic architectures and the separation into different classes provides a systematic way for their specification. To evaluate our approach we apply it to the specification and verification of the Blackboard architecture pattern.
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