The Cognitive and Human Factors of Formal Methods

As formal methods improve in expressiveness and power, they create new opportunities for non-expert adoption. In principle, formal tools are now powerful enough to enable developers to scalably validate realistic systems artifacts without extensive formal training. However, realizing this potential for adoption requires attention to not only the technical but also the human side—which has received extraordinarily little attention from formal-methods research.

This talk presents some of our efforts to address this paucity. We apply ideas from cognitive science, human-factors research, and education theory to improve the usability of formal methods. Along the way, we find misconceptions suffered by users, how technically appealing designs that experts may value may fail to help, and how our tools may even mislead users.