Early Fault Detection Tools

The traditional software development cycle relies mostly on informal methods to capture design errors in its initial phases, and on more rigorous testing methods during the later phases. It is well understood, though, that those bugs that slip through the early design phases tend to cause the most damage to a design. The anomaly of traditional design is therefore that it excels at catching bugs at the worst possible point in a design cycle: at the end. In this paper we consider what it would take to develop a suite of tools that has the opposite characteristic: excelling at catching bugs at the start, rather than the end of the design cycle. Such early fault detection tools di er from standard formal veri cation techniques in the sense that they must be able to deal with incomplete, informal design speci cations, with possibly ill-de ned requirements. They do not aim to replace either testing or formal veri cation techniques, but to complement their strengths.