Merits of formal requirements specification

Merits of formal requirements specification

Formal methods possess several positive features, some of which are discussed below.

Formal specifications encourage rigour. Often, the very process of construction of a rigorous specification is more important than the formal specification itself. The construction of a rigorous specification clarifies several aspects of system behavior that are not obvious in an informal specification.

Formal methods usually have a well-founded mathematical basis. Thus, formal specifications are not only more precise, but also mathematically sound and can be used to reason about the properties of a specification and to rigorously prove that an implementation satisfies its specifications.

Formal methods have well-defined semantics. Therefore, ambiguity in specifications is automatically avoided when one formally specifies a system.

The mathematical basis of the formal methods facilitates automating the analysis of specifications. For example, a tableau-based technique has been used to automatically check the consistency of specifications. Also, automatic theorem proving techniques can be used to verify that an implementation satisfies its specifications. The possibility of automatic verification is one of the most important advantages of formal methods.

Formal specifications can be executed to obtain immediate feedback on the features of the specified system. This concept of executable specifications is related to rapid prototyping. Informally, a prototype is a "toy" working model of a system that can provide immediate feedback on the behavior of the specified system, and is especially useful in checking the completeness of specifications.

Limitations of formal requirements specification

It is clear that formal methods provide mathematically sound frameworks within large, complex systems can be specified, developed and verified in a systematic rather than in an ad hoc manner. However, formal methods suffer from several shortcomings, some of which are the following:

Formal methods are difficult to learn and use.

The basic incompleteness results of first-order logic suggest that it is impossible to check absolute correctness of systems using theorem proving techniques.

Formal techniques are not able to handle complex problems. This shortcoming results from the fact that, even moderately complicated problems blow up the complexity of formal specification and their analysis. Also, a large unstructured set of mathematical formulas is difficult to comprehend.

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