Re:Bug finding is slow in spite of many eyeballs
by schoen on Monday February 23, 2015 @06:27PM
(#9097744)
There'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.
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.