The Changing Face of Standardization: A Place for Formal Methods?

Many of the reported experiences in the industrial use of formal methods concern the development of products or product families, where the utility of the method is linked to direct savings in development costs or improved assurance of quality. However, one other area in which formal description techniques make a valuable contribution is in the development and documentation of International Standards, where the cost of using formal methods can be paid off both through increased quality of products that implement a given standard, and through the improved inter-operability of different implementations that comes from having a precise definition of the expected behaviour of a conforming implementation. Standards development, however, has some significant differences from product development, and comes with specific needs and constraints that affect the use of formal description techniques. This paper describes the role that formal methods played in the development of a new standard for distributed multimedia presentation. It describes a number of issues that arose from this experience, and which have longer term importance for formal methods in standards, particularly given the changes that are taking place in the way that standards are developed.