Invited talk to Wetice 20205
23rd July, Catania, Italy.
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Angelo Gargantini, PI of the SAFTEST project, will give an invited talk at Wetice 2025, with title:
Are (formal) models still really useful in software engineering?
Abstract
Models, which are an abstract mathematical representation of a system, are generally used in software engineering for several reasons, including, to formally specify system requirements and share them among stakeholders (e.g., developers, clients, designers). Their main classical goal is to document the system for future reference, and to analyze the system to be built in order to find issues as soon as possible. Modeling is often associated to a classical waterfall software process model as one of the first phases of the process. In some approaches, like Model-Driven Engineering, models are paramount, while in agile processes, models play a margin (if not null) role. In this talk, we will try to give a conceptual framework able to guide developers to evaluate how much modeling is necessary in their project. We will consider problems like model updating and the cost of correcting bugs without models. Furthermore, we will introduce the idea of reverse modeling, when models are extracted from existing code and co-modeling when models and code co-evolve together linked in a formal way.