Authors:
Anna Zamansky
1
;
Maria Spichkova
2
;
Guillermo Rodriguez-Navas
3
;
Peter Herrmann
4
and
Jan Olaf Blech
5
Affiliations:
1
University of Haifa, Israel
;
2
RMIT University, Australia
;
3
Mälardalen University, Sweden
;
4
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
;
5
BHTC GmbH, Germany
Keyword(s):
Software Engineering, Lightweight Formal Methods, Verification, Validation, Software Quality.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Formal Methods
;
Simulation and Modeling
;
Software Engineering
;
Software Engineering Methods and Techniques
Abstract:
The use of lightweight formal methods (LFM) for the development of industrial applications has become a major trend. Although the term “lightweight formal methods” has been used for over ten years now, there seems to be no common agreement on what “lightweight” actually means, and different communities apply the term in all kinds of ways. In this paper, we explore the recent trends in the use of LFM, and establish our opinion that cost-effectiveness is the driving force to deploy LFM. Further, we propose a simple framework that should help to classify different LFM approaches and to estimate which of them are most cost-effective for a certain software engineering project. We demonstrate our framework using some examples.