Toward Practical Deductive Verification: Insights from a Qualitative Survey in Industry and Academia

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges and enablers of adopting deductive verification in industry and academia through interviews, providing insights and recommendations to improve its practicality and adoption.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive qualitative analysis of factors affecting deductive verification adoption, highlighting underexplored obstacles and proposing actionable guidelines.

Findings

High expertise required for formal proofs

Proof maintenance and automation control are major challenges

Usability concerns hinder broader adoption

Abstract

Deductive verification is an effective method to ensure that a given system exposes the intended behavior. In spite of its proven usefulness and feasibility in selected projects, deductive verification is still not a mainstream technique. To pave the way to widespread use, we present a study investigating the factors enabling successful applications of deductive verification and the underlying issues preventing broader adoption. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 practitioners of verification from both industry and academia and systematically analyzed the collected data employing a thematic analysis approach. Beside empirically confirming familiar challenges, e.g., the high level of expertise needed for conducting formal proofs, our data reveal several underexplored obstacles, such as proof maintenance, insufficient control over automation, and usability concerns. We further use the results from our data analysis to extract enablers and barriers for deductive verification and formulate concrete recommendations for practitioners, tool builders, and researchers, including principles for usability, automation, and integration with existing workflows.