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Use of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services (2014) [pdf] (microsoft.com)
84 points by Tomte on May 9, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



The best part was the section about finding a bug that took 35 steps to show up which got through both code reviews and testing. The ability to catch such obscure stuff is a benefit of formal methods that's been in the literature a long time. Model-checkers like TLA+ and SPIN let it get done with less skill and time than full, formal verification. Further, the properties can be combined with methods like Design-by-Contract and static analysis to knock out problems that show up 80-90% of the time.

Hardly any justification anymore to not be using these tools for most critical software. Even a mainstream company has figured it out. Hopefully, we'll see more adoption. :)



Is this the same article that appeared in the Communications of the ACM? Not behind paywall, that's a plus. (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2699417&CFID=612805967&CFT...)


It's paywalled for me.


Try using SciHub.




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