Model-Based Verification BOB LANG Formal methods have long offered the promise of ensuring high quality software using mathematical rigor. Note that this issue's director s message points to one article suggesting that 40 to 50 percent of programs contain nontrivial defects.
Formal methods represent a clear attempt to address such concerns.
However, applying traditional formal methods to a complete system design requires a significant investment from learning a difficult technology to applying it in all phases of the development effort. As a result, there have been relatively few success stories, and formal methods have failed to achieve widespread adoption. MBV involves the selective use of formal methods on abstract models of important portions of a system, thereby providing many of the benefits promised by formal methods without the associated high cost. For example, MBV can be used to augment the standard peer review process to find subtle errors that would not typically be found in such a process. MBV makes use of existing techniques such as model checking, in which abstract models of a system are built to capture the salient features of the system or a portion of the system that is considered important.