Meta Research

For organisations like Facebook, high quality software is important. However, the pace of change and increasing complexity of modern code makes it difficult to produce error free software. Available tools are often lacking in helping programmers develop more reliable and secure applications.

Formal verification is a technique able to detect software errors statically, before a product is actually shipped. Although this aspect makes this technology very appealing in principle, in practice there have been many difficulties that have hindered the application of software verification in industrial environments. In particular, in an organisation like Facebook where the release cycle is fast compared to more traditional industries, the deployment of formal techniques is highly challenging.

This paper describes our experience in integrating a verification tool based on static analysis into the software development cycle at Facebook.