Well-defined Software Process as Vehicle to Understand Effectiveness of Formal Methods

In addition to software development techniques such as formal methods, software process is important for effectively developing quality software. In the literature, we have well-defined process templates which provide mechanisms for measuring, controlling, managing, and improving the way we develop software. Well-defined process templates can serve as a vehicle to integrate advanced software engineering techniques, such as formal methods, into actual software development. We expect that students who have mastered such a well-defined process template can effectively use formal methods and understand the effectiveness of formal methods. In this paper, we report on a trial case of team software process in which students tried using a model-oriented formal specification language in a lightweight way for their project. We generated a hypothesis that students with some process capabilities understand the effectiveness of rigorously writing specifications in a formal specification language while students with less capabilities do not.