Teaching Formal Methods to Future Engineers

Abstract

Formal methods provide systematic and rigorous techniques for software development. We are convinced that they must be taught in Software Engineering curricula. In this paper, we present a set of formal methods courses included in a Software Engineering & Security track of ENSIIE, École Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique pour l'Industrie et l'Entreprise, a French engineering school delivering the « Ingénieur de l'ENSIIE » degree (master level). These techniques have been taught over the last fifteen years in our education programs in different formats. One of the difficulty we encounter is that students consider these kinds of techniques difficult and requiring much work and thus are inclined to choose other courses when they can. Furthermore, students are strongly focused on the direct applicability of the knowledge they are taught, and they are not all going to pursue a professional career in the development of critical systems. Our experience shows that students can gain confidence in formal methods when they understand that, through a rigorous mathematical approach to system specification, they acquire knowledge, skills and abilities that will be useful in their professional future as Computer Scientists/Engineers.

Teaching Interactive Proofs to Mathematicians

“…In addition to our course on Computational Logic for CS students previously mentioned, other approaches to teach formal methods to different audiences have been proposed. Restricting the discussion to a few and recently reported approaches that are focused on fulfilling quickly the specific interests of the attendants, we can mention the course on Deductive Verification in Why3 by Sandrine Blazy at the Université Rennes 1, to train undergraduate students to develop their own correctness proofs of non-trivial sorting and searching algorithms [7]; the course taught at the École Nationale Supérioure d'Informatique pour L'Industrie et L'Entrepise, as part of the Software Engineering curriculum, by Catherine Dubois et al, in which students develop skills on formal methods [11]; and, the course by Kristin Yvonne Rozier prepared for the Aerospace Engineering departments at Iowa State University and the University of Cincinnati, to train attendants to look at a verification question and identify what formal methods and tools are applicable to check safety-critical systems [27]. It is interesting to stress Catherine Dubois et al's position (in [11]) ratifying the importance of the effectiveness of the teaching approach to meet the specific demands of the target audience (in our case Mathematicians, and their case, CS/Engineers):…”