(ref.doc)csn19991025

October 25 1999

Running code versus formal testing methods

Dr. Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, was quick
to spring to the defense of the IETF testing culture. In a recent
communication, he claimed that SDL's and other formal methods have not
yielded results commensurate with the effort to use them. He believes
that the reason for this is that they are overblown, verbose, hard to
understand and hard to use. In his opinion [...] what they gain in
precision, they lose in comprehensibility.