Evaluating the effect of formal techniques in industry

In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of applying a formal component-based approach called Analytical Software Design (ASD) to the development of control software of an industrial project at Philips Healthcare. We analyze the performance of the ASD related tasks carried out during the development processes and report about the main issues encountered. Furthermore, we investigate whether introducing these formal techniques to industry could actually improve the quality and the productivity of the developed code compared to software developed by more traditional development methods

Experience report on designing and developing control components using formal methods

This paper reports on experiences from an industrial project related to developing control components of an interventional X-ray system, using formal techniques supplied by the Analytical Software Design approach, of the company Verum. We illustrate how these formal techniques were tightly integrated with the standard development processes and the steps accomplished to obtain verifiable components using model checking. Finally, we show that applying these formal techniques could result in quality software and we provide supporting statistical data for this regard