The research community has long understood the value of formal specifications in building robust software. However, the adoption of any specifications beyond run-time assertions in industrial software has been limited. All of this has changed at Microsoft in the last few years. Today, formal specifications are a mandated part of the software development process in the largest Microsoft product groups. Millions of specifications have been added, and tens of thousands of bugs have been exposed and fixed in future versions of products under development. In addition, Windows public interfaces are formally specified and the Visual Studio compiler understands and enforces these specifications, meaning that programmers anywhere can now use formal specifications to make their software more robust.
展开▼
