On software quality and engineering

[David Gibson]

On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 04:18:30AM +1100, Michael Bennett wrote:
[snip]

> Software systems do exactly what you tell them to do. The problem is most 
> people don't know what they want the software to do and just guess. Which 
> comes down to requirements and specifications. There are formal specification 
> languages that can be used to mathmatically prove the specification. Most 
> people don't use them as it takes too much time and more effort when they 
> could be programming. I know some companies now use them for all software 
> projects as they can produce software with zero defects.

More to the point, once you put the specifications into a formal
language, it's not clear that it's significantly easier to tell that
the specifications are correct than to tell that the code is correct.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david at gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson