Research summary
Recent news reports are rife with headlines about incidents involving software malfunctions-from bugs that cause Facebook and Instagram outages to major flight disruptions at airports. The consequences of these bugs can range from mere inconveniences to life-threatening incidents. This has increased the pressure for more reliable software and, in turn, the tools and techniques that can help software developers reach this goal.
Dr. Sylvain Hallé, Canada Research Chair in Software Specification, Testing and Verification, is contributing to the development of reliable software systems by focusing on their specification, testing and verification. He and his research team are studying and developing expressive specification languages and producing useful testing and verification theories and automated software tools. Ultimately, their work has the potential to significantly improve the quality of software systems in a host of fields, from web applications to database systems.