Lecture preparation

Before lecture, read the paper assigned below, and submit two items to the submission website:

Also keep in mind that you will need to write a paper summary for your choice of papers throughout the semester.

Assignment

Read the paper Use of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services by Newcombe et al.

This is the first of many research papers we will be reading in our class. If you have not had experience reading research papers, you might find it useful to read a short two-page paper called How to Read a Paper. It will help you get the most out of the papers in this class.

Why are we reading this paper?

What to learn from this paper?

Answer this question

The Amazon paper describes the experiences of the individual authors with different systems they built at Amazon and specifying their behavior using TLA+ or PlusCal. What is the value for the authors to write specifications? Why is there a value to specification, even though the authors don't verify that their implementations meets their specifications?