Marieke Huisman, Herbert Bos, Sjaak Brinkkemper, Arie van Deursen, Jan Friso Groote, Patricia Lago, Jaco van de Pol, Eelco Visser. Software that Meets Its Intent. In Tiziana Margaria, Bernhard Steffen, editors, Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Discussion, Dissemination, Applications - 7th International Symposium, ISoLA 2016, Imperial, Corfu, Greece, October 10-14, 2016, Proceedings, Part II. Volume 9953 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 609-625, 2016. [doi]
Software is widely used, and society increasingly depends on its reliability. However, software has become so complex and it evolves so quickly that we fail to keep it under control. Therefore, we propose intents: fundamental laws that capture a software systems’ intended behavior (resilient, secure, safe, sustainable, etc.). The realization of this idea requires novel theories, algorithms, tools, and techniques to discover, express, verify, and evolve software intents. Thus, future software systems will be able to verify themselves that they meet their intents. Moreover, they will be able to respond to deviations from intents through self-correction. In this article we propose a research agenda, outlining which novel theories, algorithms and tools are required.