Abstraction and Automation for Reasoning about Complex Software

现代软件开发是一项复杂而混乱的业务。要求可能不完整。新的开发使用复杂的现有库、工具和组件，可能会失败。多个开发团队按照不同的时间表进行，这使得很难保证他们的工件能够按照预期的那样“互相交谈”。每次进行更改时，都需要执行昂贵的质量保证，以确保软件仍然做它应该做的事情。这样的问题变得更加可怕，因为许多公司，特别是在汽车、电子、航空航天和国防领域，需要维护具有相似但不相同功能的软件产品变体系列（例如，支持不同类型的客户和/或软件平台）。

Modern software development is a complex and messy business. Requirements are likely incomplete. New development uses complex existing libraries, tools and components that can fail. Multiple development teams proceed on different schedules, making it difficult to assure that their artifacts will “talk to each other” as intended. Every time a change is made, expensive quality assurance needs to be performed to ensure that software still does what it was supposed to. Such problems are made even more dire because many companies, especially in automotive, electronics, aerospace and defense domains, need to maintain families of software product variants with similar yet not identical functionality (e.g., supporting different types of customers and/or software platforms).