Software technology - formal methods and scientific foundations

Formal methods have been seen as ways to improve the quality of the software development process. However, apart from the interesting idea to apply mathematics and logic directly to software development activities, there is an urgent need to create a scientific foundation on which today's software technology practise can be based. We discuss the progress in formal methods and their influence in forming a scientific foundation for software technology. We argue that logics and mathematics provide a scientific basis for software engineering, which leads to a deeper understanding of the development process and a more powerful tool support. We point out, how software engineering methods can be backed up by mathematics. We discuss the benefits of such a mathematical foundation that go far beyond the application of so-called formal methods for the specification and verification of software. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.