Formal Methods: Present and Future,

It is widely accepted that industrial software production has a number of associated difficulties and problems. These include the following 1 The proportion of system costs due to software has increased dramatically over the last 20 years and is continuing t do so. This poses major problems for technical management who are frequently qualified and experienced in more traditional engineering discipline 2 A major skill shortage exists in software and is expected to continue to increase 3 The quality of delivered software is frequently inadequate in performance and reliability 4 Software projects are subject to frequent cost and timescale over-runs. The causes are usually inadequate engineering methods to handle the complexity of systems and inadequate project management techniques and 5 There is at present relatively little underlying theory or generally accepted good practice on which to base an software engineering approach. As a consequence, software systems tend to be crafted rather than engineered. These and related problems have by now received world-wide recognition. A number of major initiatives have consequently been instituted to address these issues, for example, the Alvey Software Engineering programme and the ESPRIT Software Technology programme.