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What the Software Engineer should Know about Program Verification

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Software Engineering Education
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Abstract

For the purposes of this paper, software verification can be defined as the methods used to ensure that a program meets its specifications and that the documentation correctly represents both program and specification. From the definition, it is obvious that it is impossible to do verification without a specification. This may seem like a simple point, but it is surprising the number of projects I have seen where there was no written specification of what the program was supposed to do. Let there be no confusion. If you do not have a precise, written specification of what the program is supposed to do, it is impossible to verify program operation.

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References

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  2. Brooks, F.P., The Mythical Man Month. Addison Wesley, Reading, Mass. (1975). See also Datamation (1974), 45–52.

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  3. Shooman, M.L. and Bolsky, M.L., “Types, Distribution, and Test and Correction Times for Programming Errors”. SIGPLAN Notices 10, 6, (June 1975), 347–357.

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© 1976 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.

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Bredt, T.H. (1976). What the Software Engineer should Know about Program Verification. In: Wasserman, A.I., Freeman, P. (eds) Software Engineering Education. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-9898-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-9898-4_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-90216-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-9898-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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