# 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.

## Key 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).

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/1812.08815