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>we need tools that make development easier, to allow keeping up with the rapidly changing requirements in the software world. The practice of Test driven deve
by lgunsch 12y ago
>we need tools that make development easier, to allow keeping up with the rapidly changing requirements in the software world.
The practice of Test driven development is a great solution to this. The problem is very few people use it, many people actually are against it, and many of those that do do it, do it incorrectly (not on purpose). I would think that small chunks of singly-purposed functionality would be much easier to verify.
- schoen 12y agoThere's kind of a considerable gap between formally verified software and test-driven development, though. For example, a parser or the routines that go into it might pass dozens or hundreds of unit tests, yet still fail to parse certain inputs correctly, fail to parse them in exactly the same way as another parser (as Langsec researchers have emphasized, often producing possible time-of-check/time-of-use vulnerabilities), or even have a memory corruption bug. I don't mention this in order to criticize test-driven development or the improvements it can bring to software reliability or safety, just to point out that there's still a big gap from there to a formal proof of correctness.