CIS 771 Weekly Explorations
CIS 771 Weekly Explorations
In addition to assigned exercises and reading, the course instructors
will often identify material that is interesting and relevant for
the course. The study of the material is not required, but
we hope that students will take time to explore the material listed
on this page.
Several general resources on formal methods are listed below, as
well as some resources for the well-known specification method Z.
As the course progresses, additional material relevant to the
weekly lectures will be posted.
Online Documentation and Resources
Here are some other resources that you might enjoy exploring.
- Here
is a fragment of an online forum discussion in which some hackers
(who are generally not working in the area of formal methods)
are discussing the practicality and effectiveness of formal methods,
and how formal methods might be used in software engineering of the
future. With which sorts of sentiments to do you find your self
agreeing? Come back to this discussion as the course progresses to
see how your opinions and assessment of formal methods changes.
Thanks to David Bacon for a pointer to this discussion
- Nancy Leveson
has done a lot on system and software safety. There are a lot of
interesting safety related links from her home page. In particular,
her 50-page summary of the Therac-25 failures can
be found here.
You might want to start with this short student
paper.