A User-Centered View on Formal Methods: Interactive Support for Validation and Verification

During early phases of the development of an interactive system, future system properties are identified (through interaction with end users e.g. in the brainstorming and prototyping phases of the development process, or by re-quirements provided by other stakeholders) imposing re-quirements on the final system. Some of these properties rely on informal aspects of the system (e.g. satisfaction of users) and can be checked by questionnaires, while other ones require the use of formal methods. Whether these properties are specific to the application under development or generic to a class of applications, the verification of the presence of these properties in the system under construc-tion usually involve verification tools to process the formal description of the system. The usability [26] of these tools has a significant impact on the V&V phases which usually remains perceived as very resource consuming. This posi-tion paper proposes the application of action theory to iden-tify complex aspects of verification and exploits it for iden-tifying areas of improvement.