Formal and informal specifications of a secure system component: Final results in a comparative study

This paper presents the findings from the later phases of a study of the effects of introducing formal specification to the commercialscale development of a small security-critical system component. The objectives and form of the study are briefly reviewed. Observations have been made of the effort profile across the project, compliance of the developed system with customer requirements and software characteristics. The results of these observations are presented. Conclusions and areas of further work are discussed.