FormaliSE 2013 - FME Workshop on Formal Methods in Software Engineering (FormaliSE 2013)

The software industry has a long-standing and well-earned reputation for failing to deliver on its promises and it is clear that still nowadays, the success of software projects with the current technologies cannot be assured. For large complex projects ad hoc approaches have proven inadequate to assure the correct behavior of the delivered software. The lack of formalization in key places makes software engineering overly sensitive to the weaknesses that are inevitable in the complex activities behind software creation. Aids to precision in each phase of software development and crosschecking are essential, and this is precisely one the objectives of formal methods.
Formal methods (FMs) are intended to provide the means for greater precision in both thinking and documenting the preliminary stage of the software creation process. When done well, this can aid all aspects of software creation: user requirement formulation, implementation, verification/testing, and the creation of documentation. However, the maturing of formal techniques into real-life software engineering involves providing notations and tools that are readily understood and used by practitioners, and the integration of such tools with activities that are far from the unrealistic assumptions that characterized some earlier research in formal methods.
After decades of research, and despite significant advancement, formal methods are still not widely used in industrial software development. This may be due to the fact that the formal methods community has not enough focused its attention to software engineering needs, and kits specific role in the software process. At the same time, from a software engineering perspective, there could be a number of fundamental principles that might help to guide the design of formal methods in order to make them more easily applicable in the development of software applications.
The main goal of the workshop is to foster integration between the formal methods and the software engineering communities with the purpose to examine the link between the two more carefully than is currently the case.
Areas of interest include but are not limited to:
-integration of FMs with the rest of the software development life cycle;
-ability of FMs to handle real-world problems;
-scalability of FM applications;
-prescriptive/objective guidance in the use of FMs;
-FMs in a certification context;
-“Lightweight” or usable FMs;
-experimental validation;
-application experiences.