Proceedings of the 4th FME Workshop on Formal Methods in Software Engineering

Abstract

FormaliSE is a yearly workshop on Formal Methods in Software Engineering. FormaliSE is organised by FME (Formal Methods Europe) and is co-located with ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering). The software industry has a long-standing and well-earned reputation for failing to deliver on its promises and it is clear that still nowadays, the success of software projects with the current technologies cannot be assured. For large complex projects, many approaches have proven inadequate to assure the correct behaviour of the delivered software, despite the efforts of the (often very skilled) software engineers involved. The lack of formalization in key places makes software engineering overly sensitive to the weaknesses that are inevitable in the complex activities behind software creation. It is an increasingly complex task to develop large software systems because the systems are huge, with very complex behaviour, and many algorithms employed today are "pushing the limits" of what people can comprehend. This is where formal methods (FMs) have a huge opportunity. The main goal of the workshop is to foster integration between the formal methods and the software engineering communities. This need to achieve dialogue between the fairly small formal methods community and the (much larger) community of software scientists and practitioners forms the principal motivation holding for our workshop, and for our desire to hold it at ICSE.