EMBARGOED UNTIL AUGUST 26, 2005 AT 17:00 ET
Newswise — Software projects are getting larger and more complex, and as many as 70 percent of them, by some estimates, are running into trouble: going over their budget, missing deadlines, or even collapsing completely. But a small British firm claims it doesn't have to be that way. Praxis High-Integrity Systems, in Bath, U.K., was founded on the simple idea that software errors should be eliminated during all stages of a project.
The September issue of IEEE Spectrum features a special report on software. As part of the report, Contributing Editor Philip E. Ross reveals how Praxis does its work and how it became one of the foremost software houses to use mathematically based techniques, known as formal methods, to develop software. Formal methods require that programmers begin their work not by writing code but rather by stringing together special symbols that represent the program's logic. Like a mathematical theorem, these symbol strings can be checked to verify that they form logically correct statements.
With an average of less than one error in every 10 000 lines of delivered code, however, Praxis claims a bug rate that is at least 50--and possibly as much as 1000--times better than the industry standard. Praxis is still a small, lonely asteroid compared to the Jupiter-size companies that dominate the software universe, companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Nevertheless, even though the company may not have all the answers to make software projects more successful, those working in the field can learn plenty of lessons from it, its advocates say.
RSS