Work

Reality Check on Formal Methods in Industry: A Study of Verum Dezyne

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: ABSTRACT Many of the classical questions reflecting the actionable use of formal methods in the software industry—“do they scale?” or “are they easily integrated?”—remain without a definitive answer, with many potentially adoptable formal notations being exploited in industry, but in a rather stove‐piped and siloed fashion, and with rather few, sometimes anecdotal, success stories to tell. In this article, we strive to provide some more answers to the aforementioned questions on formal methods adoption in industry. We focus our study on a widely adopted formal methods framework in Europe, that is, Verum Dezyne, employed by embedded‐computing and hardware‐programming companies including Thermo‐Fisher, Philips, and more. Results convey a rather interesting story—requiring further study into these matters—but also highlight practical insights for formal practitioners in the field, for example, that formal methods do not disrupt existing processes and scalability issues can be easily addressed by applying mainstream engineering practices, such as decomposition.

Source: Journal of Software Evolution and Process

DOI: 10.1002/smr.70069

Authors: Michele Chiari, Matteo Camilli, Marcello M. Bersani, Rutger van Beusekom, Damian A. Tamburri

Institutions: TU Wien, Politecnico di Milano

Language: English

Topic: Formal Methods in Verification

Subfield: Computational Theory and Mathematics

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $4,480

Funder: Technische Universitat Wien