Embedding Formal Development in Software Engineering

Formal methods have had considerable success in developing the theoretical fundamentals of many areas of computing, but have had considerably less success at penetrating the areas where those formal techniques could be applied. This can be regarded as a failure of formal methods. This paper is concerned, in particular, with the lack of impact of formal techniques on software development, and especially on software development curricula. The paper presents some diagnoses of the cause of the problem and discusses attempts at integration of formal development into a Software Engineering program.