Pet Formalisms versus Industry-Proven Survivors: Issues on Formal Methods Education

Abstract

Formal methods are gaining steady industrial acceptance as a promising approach to developing high-quality software. Although educators find it increasingly important to include formal methods in their software engineering curriculum, they face a dilemma: there are too large numbers and diverse flavors of formal methods to cover in a limited time, and little empirical data exists on relative strengths and weaknesses among them. How can we best develop a curriculum on formal methods given several practical constraints? In this paper we describe our approaches, share experiences, and evaluate results. Our goal is to stimulate further discussion among software engineering education communities on how formal methods can be most effectively introduced to current and next generation software engineers.