Formal Methods in Dependable Systems Engineering: A Survey of Professionals from Europe and North America

TL;DR

This survey investigates the adoption of formal methods in mission-critical software, revealing increased industry interest but highlighting challenges like scalability and skills, and providing insights for future research.

Contribution

It is the largest study of formal methods adoption, offering new empirical insights into industry perceptions and challenges across Europe and North America.

Findings

Increased intent to apply formal methods in industry

Perceived usefulness is high, ease of use is low

Scalability, skills, and education are key challenges

Abstract

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 Parkin (1993).