Balance between Formal and Informal Methods, Engineering and Artistry, Evolution and Rebuild

Edward A. Lee

Technical Memorandum UCB/ERL M04/19
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
July 4, 2004.

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ABSTRACT

This paper is the result of a workshop entitled "Software Reliability for FCS" that was organized by the Army Research Office, held on May 18-19, 2004, and hosted by: Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS), Vanderbilt University. I was given the charge of leading one of four topic areas, and was assigned the title. This is my summary of the results of the workshop on this topic.

It may well be that established approaches to software engineering will not be sufficient to avert a software disaster in FCS and similarly ambitious, software-intensive efforts. This topic examines the tension between informal methods, particularly those that focus on the human, creative process of software engineering and the management of that process, and formal methods, specifically those that rely on mathematically rooted systems theories and semantic frameworks. It is arguable that, as these approaches are construed today by their respective (largely disjoint) research communities, neither offers much hope of delivering reliable FCS software. Although certainly these communities have something to offer, the difficulties may be more deeply rooted than either approach can address. In this workshop, we took an aggressive stand that there are problems in software that are intrinsically unsolvable with today's software technology. This stand asserts that no amount of process will fix the problems because the problems are not with the process, and that today's formal techniques cannot solve the problem as long as they remain focused on formalizing today's software technologies. A sea change in the underlying software technology could lead to more effective informal and formal methods. What form could that take?