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Rooting Formal Methods Within Higher Education Curricula for Computer Science and Software Engineering — A White Paper —

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Formal Methods – Fun for Everybody (FMFun 2019)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1301))

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Abstract

This white paper argues that formal methods need to be better rooted in higher education curricula for computer science and software engineering programmes of study. To this end, it advocates

  • improved teaching of formal methods;

  • systematic highlighting of formal methods within existing, ‘classical’ computer science courses; and

  • the inclusion of a compulsory formal methods course in computer science and software engineering curricula.

These recommendations are based on the observations that

  • formal methods are an essential and cost-effective means to increase software quality; however

  • computer science and software engineering programmes typically fail to provide adequate training in formal methods; and thus

  • there is a lack of computer science graduates who are qualified to apply formal methods in industry.

This white paper is the result of a collective effort by authors and participants of the 1st International Workshop on Formal Methods – Fun for Everybody which was held in Bergen, Norway, 2–3 December 2019. As such, it represents insights based on learning and teaching computer science and software engineering (with or without formal methods) at various universities across Europe.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Pattis [Pat94] even suggested teaching Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) as the first topic in computer science. Not to facilitate presenting the syntax of a programming language, but because EBNF is a microcosm of programming. With no prerequisites, students are introduced to a variety of fundamental concepts in programming: formal systems, abstraction, control structures, equivalence of descriptions, the difference between syntax and semantics, and the relative power of recursion versus iteration.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/javapathfinder/jpf-core/wiki.

  3. 3.

    The recent The Java®Language Specification, Java SE 14 Edition is 800 pages [GJS+20] and not easily digestible.

  4. 4.

    AlphaZero is the descendant of AlphaGo, the AI that became known for defeating Lee Sedol, the world’s best Go player, in March of 2016.

  5. 5.

    Nature, 26 May 2016.

  6. 6.

    This is not eased by the often poor error messages provided by formal method tools.

  7. 7.

    https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safety.

  8. 8.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCwyOSHRBi0.

  9. 9.

    https://gitlab.cs.uni-duesseldorf.de/general/stups/prob2-jupyter-kernel/-/blob/master/notebooks/tutorials/prob_solver_intro.ipynb.

  10. 10.

    https://icpc.baylor.edu/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan

    Antonio Cerone & Rustam Zhumagambetov

  2. Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Markus Roggenbach, Casey Denner & Faron Moller

  3. University of Bath, Bath, UK

    James Davenport

  4. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Marie Farrell

  5. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Magne Haveraaen

  6. Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Philipp Körner

  7. Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, Krefeld, Germany

    Sebastian Krings

  8. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Peter Csaba Ölveczky

  9. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Bernd-Holger Schlingloff

  10. Innopolis University, Kazan, Russia

    Nikolay Shilov

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  1. Antonio Cerone
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  7. Faron Moller
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  8. Philipp Körner
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  9. Sebastian Krings
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  10. Peter Csaba Ölveczky
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  11. Bernd-Holger Schlingloff
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  13. Rustam Zhumagambetov
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antonio Cerone .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan

    Antonio Cerone

  2. Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Markus Roggenbach

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Cerone, A. et al. (2021). Rooting Formal Methods Within Higher Education Curricula for Computer Science and Software Engineering — A White Paper —. In: Cerone, A., Roggenbach, M. (eds) Formal Methods – Fun for Everybody. FMFun 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1301. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71374-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71374-4_1

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