Towards Classification of Lightweight Formal Methods
This work addresses the problem of inconsistent terminology and selection criteria for lightweight formal methods, primarily for software engineers and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing trends without introducing a new method.
The paper tackles the lack of a common definition for lightweight formal methods (LFM) in industrial software development, proposing a classification framework based on cost-effectiveness to help estimate the most suitable LFM for specific projects.
The use of lightweight formal methods (LFM) for the development of industrial applications has become a major trend. Although the term "lightweight formal methods" has been used for over ten years now, there seems to be no common agreement on what "lightweight" actually means, and different communities apply the term in all kinds of ways. In this paper, we explore the recent trends in the use of LFM, and establish our opinion that cost-effectiveness is the driving force to deploy LFM. Further, we propose a simple framework that should help to classify different LFM approaches and to estimate which of them are most cost-effective for a certain software engineering project. We demonstrate our framework using some examples.