[SystemSafety] Use of Formal Methods

[Mario Gleirscher]

Dear Derek, Gergely,
dear all,

thank you for sharing your reasonable concerns.

First of all, we are sorry not to have implemented conditional questions
to avoid tediously answering with "no..." to all the questions.

Apart from that, our intention is not to promote formal methods but to
find out about current and intended use of FMs AND intentions NOT to use
FMs of any kind for meaningful reasons. We think it is important to
confirm known limitations of FMs, to find out more about unknown
limitations of FMs but also about unkown potentials! And it is important
to say that FMs only represent a specific view on a fragment of
mathematics relevant to engineering quality assurance.

We indeed spent some effort to make it possible for people not even
knowledgable in FMs to walk through the questionnaire and provide an
opinion. However, we assume that our target group has some educational
background in engineering or the sciences (i.e. physics, computer
science, math, elec. eng., mech. eng., chem. eng., etc.).

We are highly interested in actually getting other opinions. Outliers
are welcome, particularly, if they lump and, hence, can't be seen as
outliers anymore.

We try to get a representative picture. It is needless to say that data
points from persons with at least some FM experience, whether negative
or positive, are of even more importance.

Please, feel free to check to which extent the survey meets your
expectations. I am sure, it should be rather easy to fill it out even if
you don't find FMs useful or even if you have little experience in
applying them in any meaningful practical setting.

Kind regards,
Mario

On 25.10.2017 14:05, Derek M Jones wrote:
> Michael,
> 
>> I'm assuming that my views will not be of value in your survey, but
>> I'd be interested to see the results if it is possible for you to
>> release them.
> 
> Formal methods proponents like guarantees answers.
> 
> Creating a survey that cannot be completed by anybody who does not
> use formal methods is a technique for removing pesky outliers
> from the measurements, which 'improves' the quality of the results.
> 

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