Jul 10, 2026 · 23 min · 12 segments
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Gabriela Moreira about…
Gabriela MoreiraGuest
Shane HastieHost
I think people do think like, "Oh, I should get into this formal methods thing.

I should learn." Like, they feel this responsibility, but I don't really like that.

I prefer to see formal methods as a solution to a problem they already have.

A large part of software engineering community has this problem of, like, not being able to think about all of the edge cases, all of the corner cases of the complex systems we are developing.

It's true that some systems are fairly trivial, but most systems have this degree of complexity where different sequences of events can lead to different outcomes, and it's super hard to think about all of the possible sequences.

And the sequences can be, like, the scheduler of your operational system and when do you get the lock, or it can be the sequence of what the users intend to do in your interface, right? It can be def- very different levels.

So all of us are thinking about these things all the time, and formal methods really help us think about that.

It, it helps us define what are the sequences, what are the behaviors, and what are the properties about those behaviors, and then check things and actually find corner cases, which might be problems or not, but it helps us find those corner cases and, and understand better our...

So I think it's more of a solution than, like, a responsibility or something you have to learn.

I think people do think like, "Oh, I should get into this formal methods thing.

I should learn." Like, they feel this responsibility, but I don't really like that.

I prefer to see formal methods as a solution to a problem they already have.

A large part of software engineering community has this problem of, like, not being able to think about all of the edge cases, all of the corner cases of the complex systems we are developing.

It's true that some systems are fairly trivial, but most systems have this degree of complexity where different sequences of events can lead to different outcomes, and it's super hard to think about all of the possible sequences.

And the sequences can be, like, the scheduler of your operational system and when do you get the lock, or it can be the sequence of what the users intend to do in your interface, right? It can be def- very different levels.

So all of us are thinking about these things all the time, and formal methods really help us think about that.

It, it helps us define what are the sequences, what are the behaviors, and what are the properties about those behaviors, and then check things and actually find corner cases, which might be problems or not, but it helps us find those corner cases and, and understand better our...

So I think it's more of a solution than, like, a responsibility or something you have to learn.
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