Software Reliability Methods - (BOOK)

Many textbooks are devoted to formal methods, and their use for increasing software quality. However, they often embrace one particular method, and present it, in its full glory, as a suggested solution for the software reliability problem. This book presents a wider picture of formal methods, through a collection of notations and techniques. It compares them, and discusses their advantages and disadvantages. This is of course not the whole picture. Formal methods are constantly being developed and improved. Methods that seem promising today, may become obsolete in a few years. The main struggle in formal methods is to transfer the technology developed by researchers to the software development community. Formal methods need to be intuitive to use (preferably using graphical GUIs), must not incur an extensive learning period, and incur only small overhead to the development process. Formal methods are much more acceptable today than ten or twenty years ago, in particular in the hardware industry. Yet, there is still a contention between different approaches and consequently, between the developers of the techniques and tools. The focus in this book is on describing the main principles of formal methods, through a collection of techniques.