Boost the Impact of Continuous Formal Verification in Industry
This addresses the problem of making formal verification more practical and accessible for software developers in industry, though it is incremental as it builds on existing DevOps methods.
The paper tackles the scalability and adaptability bottleneck of software model checking in industry by integrating it into DevOps practices, focusing on continuous formal verification of software modifications guided by regression tests to fit into developer workflows.
Software model checking has experienced significant progress in the last two decades, however, one of its major bottlenecks for practical applications remains its scalability and adaptability. Here, we describe an approach to integrate software model checking techniques into the DevOps culture by exploiting practices such as continuous integration and regression tests. In particular, our proposed approach looks at the modifications to the software system since its last verification, and submits them to a continuous formal verification process, guided by a set of regression test cases. Our vision is to focus on the developer in order to integrate formal verification techniques into the developer workflow by using their main software development methodologies and tools.