Formal Modeling in a Commercial Setting: A Case Study

This paper describes a case study conducted in collaboration with Nortel to demonstrate the feasibility of applying formal modeling techniques to telecommunication systems. A formal description language, SDL, was chosen by our qualitative CASE tool evaluation to model a multimedia-messaging system described by an 80-page natural language specification. Our model was used to identify errors in the software requirements document and to derive test suites, shadowing the existing development process and keeping track of a variety of productivity data.