Practical Issues with Formal Specifications - Lessons Learned from an Industrial Case Study

Many software companies still seem to be reluctant to use formal specifications in their development processes. Nevertheless, the trend towards implementing critical business applications in distributed environments makes such applications an attractive target for formal methods. Additionally, the rising complexity also increases the willingness of the development teams to apply formal techniques. In this paper, we report on our experiences in formally specifying several core components of one of our commercially available products. While writing the formal specification, we experienced several issues that had a noticeable consequences on our work. While most of these issues can be attributed to the specific method and tools we have used, we do consider some of the problems as more general, impeding the practical application of formal methods, especially by non-experts, in large scale industrial development.