Scrum goes formal: Agile methods for safety-critical systems

Abstract

Formal methods have had a relative low penetration in industry but have the potential for much wider use. The use of agile methods has been highly limited in development of safety-critical systems due to the lack of formal evaluation techniques and rigorous planning. A combination of formal methods and agile development processes can potentially widen the use of formal methods in industry as well as enabling the use of agile methods in development of safety-critical systems. This paper describes a way to add the use of formal methods to the agile development process Scrum. Experiences from using a variant of the strategy in an industrial case are summarised.