In this talk, I reflect on formal and informal methods that are, or are becoming available to software engineers, ranging from manual testing to static analysis, fuzzing, symbolic execution and formal verification. These reflections are shaped by my experiences designing and applying different forms of program analysis techniques (with a focus on the middle ground between formal and informal methods) to a wide range of software systems and software engineering problems.

Cristian Cadar is Professor of Software Reliability in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where he leads the Software Reliability Group, working on automatic techniques for increasing the reliability and security of software systems. Cristian’s research has been recognised by several prestigious awards, including the EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Award, the HVC Award, the BCS Roger Needham Award, the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, and the ACM CCS Test of Time Award. He also received an ERC Consolidator Grant and an EPSRC Early-Career Fellowship. Many of the research techniques he co-authored have been open-sourced and used by several groups in both academia and industry. In particular, he is co-author and the principal maintainer of the KLEE symbolic execution system, a popular system with a large user base. Cristian has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, and undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.