Teaching Formal Methods: Lessons Learnt from Using Event-B

摘要

This paper summarises our experience in teaching Formal Methods to Computer Science and Software Engineers students from various universities around the world, including the University of Madeira in Portugal, the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the University of The Andes in Colombia, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the USA, and Innopolis University (INNO) in Russia. We report challenges we have faced during the past 10 to 15 years when teaching formal methods using the Event B formalism, and describe how we have evolved the structure of our courses to respond to those challenges. We strive to help students to build skills on Formal Methods that they can employ later on in their future IT jobs in software Industry. Our goal is to promote the wide use of Formal Methods by software Industry. We consider that this goal cannot be achieved without first universities transferring to Industry students with a strong background in Formal Methods and related formal tools. Formal Methods are key to software development because they are based on Discrete Mathematics which can be used to properly reason about properties that the software one develops should have. We have conducted two surveys among our students, the first one at CMU and the second one at INNO, that we use here to document and justify our decisions in terms of the course structure. The first survey is about the use of Event B as main mathematical formalism, and the second one is about the organisation of teams of students within the classroom to work on software projects that use Event B as main mathematical formalism. Our hope is that our work can be reused by other Faculty to make their own decisions on course structure and content in the teaching of their Formal Methods courses.