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Enabling continuous integration in a formal methods setting

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Abstract

In modern software development, the practices of continuous integration and DevOps are widely used to increase delivery speed and reduce the time it takes to deploy software changes to production. If formal method tools cannot be efficiently integrated in a DevOps paradigm, then their impact on software development will be reduced. In this paper, we present work addressing this issue through a series of extensions for the Overture tool supporting the Vienna Development Method. These extensions enable Overture to be used in a DevOps setting, through continuous integration and validation of models and generated code via integration with the Jenkins automation server. We frame the integration of formal methods and DevOps in a series of principles, demonstrate the value of this integration through a case study, and reflect on our experiences using formal methods and DevOps in an industrial setting. We hope that this work can help other formal method practitioners integrate their tools with DevOps.

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Notes

  1. https://www.agcocorp.com/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped us improve the manuscript. The authors would also like to thank Nick Battle for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Finally, we would like to thank Innovation Fund Denmark for supporting parts of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. United Technologies Research Center, Cork, Ireland

    Luis Diogo Couto

  2. DIGIT, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Peter W. V. Tran-Jørgensen & Peter Gorm Larsen

  3. AGCO A/S, Randers, Denmark

    René S. Nilsson

Authors
  1. Luis Diogo Couto
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  2. Peter W. V. Tran-Jørgensen
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  3. René S. Nilsson
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  4. Peter Gorm Larsen
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Correspondence to Peter W. V. Tran-Jørgensen.

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Couto, L.D., Tran-Jørgensen, P.W.V., Nilsson, R.S. et al. Enabling continuous integration in a formal methods setting. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 22, 667–683 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-019-00546-y

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