# Towards Classification of Lightweight Formal Methods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01923/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Establishing trust in automated reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12351/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The use of lightweight formal methods (LFM) for the development of industrial applications has become a major trend. Although the term "lightweight formal methods" has been used for over ten years now, there seems to be no common agreement on what "lightweight" actually means, and different communities apply the term in all kinds of ways. In this paper, we explore the recent trends in the use of LFM, and establish our opinion that cost-effectiveness is the driving force to deploy LFM. Further, we propose a simple framework that should help to classify different LFM approaches and to estimate which of them are most cost-effective for a certain software engineering project. We demonstrate our framework using some examples.