Code to Qed, the Project Manager's Guide to Proof Engineering

Abstract

Despite growing efforts and encouraging successes in recent decades, fully formally verified projects are still rare in the industrial landscape. The industry often lacks the tools and methodologies to efficiently scale the proof development process. In this work, we give a comprehensible overview of the proof development process for proof developers and project managers. The goal is to support proof developers by rationalizing the proof development process, which currently relies heavily on their intuition and expertise, and by facilitating communication with the management line. To this end, we concentrate on the aspect of proof manufacturing and highlight the most significant sources of proof effort. We propose means to mitigate the latter through proof practices (proof structuring, proof strategies, and proof planning), proof metrics, and tools. Our approach is project-agnostic, independent of specific proof expertise, and computed estimations do not assume prior similar developments. We evaluate our guidelines using a separation kernel undergoing formal verification, driving the proof process in an optimised way. Feedback from a project manager unfamiliar with proof development confirms the benefits of detailed planning of the proof development steps, clear progress communication to the hierarchy line, and alignment with established practices in the software industry.