More Programming Than Programming: Teaching Formal Methods in a Software Engineering Programme

. Formal methods for software correctness are critical to the future of software engineering — and so must be an essential part of software engineering education. Unfortunately, formal methods are often resisted by students due to perceived difficulty, mathematicity, and practical irrelevance. We redeveloped our software correctness course by taking a programming intensive approach, using the solver-aided language Dafny to provide instant formative feedback via automated assessment. Our redeveloped course increased student retention and resulted in the best evaluation for the course for at least ten years. Abstract Formal Modelling: We also considered taking an approach based on abstract formal modelling. High-level tools, such as TLA+ [33], Alloy Alloy [27] or SPIN [26], support reasoning and mechanised checking of systems’ properties, based on abstract models of those systems, rather than actual programming and source code. It is clear that these kinds of abstract formal models can play an important role in software engineering projects, at least in project’s the early stages,