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Fig. 1. The People, Process and Tools/Techniques Triangle
the focus is on the tools/techniques themselves and the highly skilled individuals who
are needed to apply them. Medium sized software companies, where the distance from
the bottom to the top of the corporate ladder is short, focus primarily on processes and
the people. Very large software companies often focus on process and tools/techniques
but from a long-term strategic perspective in which the dependence on small numbers
of very highly skilled individuals is diminished. These are three rather independent
dimensions are illustrated in Figure 1.
Formal methods form a part of the tools/techniques area of the picture, employed
by good developers when it makes business sense to do so. Indeed, the proponents of
formal methods may have concentrated too much of their efforts on tools and techniques
at the expense of people (making methods accessible to the majority of professionals)
and processes (integrating the technology with existing practice). Formal techniques
may not always be the right choice for essential parts of systems, so it is important to
have a good understanding of the interaction between a formally developed component
and parts that are developed using other means. In addition entire systems are seldom
developed from scratch. In many projects large legacy components form a part of the
solution and so it is important to be able to easily understand how such legacy parts fit
with a formal model.
In this paper, we consider this balance between effort and insight, especially as it
has been found in model-oriented specification and in VDM. We first review our own
involvement by giving a brief account of VDM and developments in the formalism
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