An industrial experience in the use of UNITY

Abstract

This paper presents the history of the use of UNITY in the development of a portion of a large mainframe class operating system. The emphasis is on the practical aspects of the problem of using a formal discipline such as UNITY in an industrial environment. The process of introducing the technology is sketched and the currently available data about the project are also presented. UNITY has been shown to be remarkably suitable for resolving the practical problem of rewriting a portion of an existing system. However there are still serious difficulties, mostly of organizational and educational nature, that must be overcome. The reward for the use of UNITY is very high since in the particular experiment described here no errors have been discovered so far. This is an indication of the enormous potential of an appropriate formal method for these kind of applications.