Jean-Christophe Deprez, Christophe Ponsard, Renaud De Landtsheer, Evidence-based Assistance for the Adoption of Formal Methods in the Industry, book chapter of "Industrial deployment of system engineering methods providing high dependability and productivity", A. Romanovsky, M. Thomas (Eds), Springer. April 2013.
Managing change in the industrial development processes is often a chal-
lenge. It involves many levels of the organisation: the top management who needs
to understand the benefits and impact of the change, the project managers who need to understand the new process and adapt their planning and monitoring habits, and the engineers who need to be trained to new methods and tools. This is especially true for the introduction of Formal Methods (FM) that may significantly impact the software development lifecycle processes. Industries wanting to adopt formal methods often need assistance to understand their benefit, what formal methods can be used at what phase of the development lifecycle and what strategy to use for a successful deployment of formal methods.
During the DEPLOY project, an entire segment of work was dedicated to collecting important material to use as evidence for providing answers to recurring concerns of companies wanting to investigate the usage of formal methods. This chapter presents the overall approach used to collect and to structure DEPLOY material as an evidence repository, notably, using success stories and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). Those are fully published on www.fm4industry.org . A sample of success stories and FAQ answers are given along with explanations on how companies in typical Industry situations can navigate in the evidence repository to find information relevant to their contexts.
Finally, we also discuss how an Industry engaged in an adoption process can set up its own internal evidence based on their specific context and how it can share its experience without compromising potentially confidential information.
About the book:
This book is about experience gained and lessons learnt during a major European project on industrial deployment of formal methods. The DEPLOY Integrated Project ran for 4 years and involved 15 partners from academia and industry.
Book web site at Springer
Our chapter is also available from Springer (Appendix B)
More on the book at Rodin Tools