Dependable Software by Design: Model-Checking Tool
sduford on May 22 2006 at 1:07 pm | Filed under: Computers, Software
Another interesting entry from the Scientific American blog:
Scientific American: Dependable Software by Design
“Computers fly our airliners and run most of the world’s banking, communications, retail and manufacturing systems. Now powerful analysis tools will at last help software engineers ensure the reliability of their designs.”
This article describes a new research tool from MIT called Alloy Analyzer. This tool is a software design model-checking tool. It is patterned after similar tools used by the semi-conductor industry to check complex chip designs for flaws. Basically, you describe your design using a high-level modeling language (Alloy) and the system goes through millions of permutations to test every possible combination of states. It is apparently able to highlight many design flaws even in the simplest designs. This could have some very interesting implications for the design of any mission-critical software.
You can find out more on the Alloy Web Site, where you can also download the Alloy Analyzer. If you are involved in sotware engineering, this is well worth downloading and exploring.
