Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing.

The Concurrency Workbench is an automated tool for analyzing networks of finite-state processes expressed in Milner's Calculus of Communicating Systems. Its key feature is its breadth: a variety of different verification methods, including equivalence checking, preorder checking, and model checking, are supported for several different process semantics. One experience from our work is that a large number of interesting verification methods can be formulated as combinations of a small number of primitive algorithms. The Workbench has been applied to the verification of communications protocols and mutual exclusion algorithms and has proven a valuable aid in teaching and research.

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