Towards Better Formal Methods Visualizations

<p dir="ltr">Formal methods are mathematical techniques for specifying and verifying complex systems. While powerful, they can be difficult to understand, validate, and debug, which can limit their adoption. Visualizations can aid these processes. In this work, we present an interview study to understand how users of formal methods use visualizations in their workflow. The results of the interview study inspire the designs of Penlloy – a domain-specific visualizer for the Alloy modeling language – and our preliminary work on formalizing the notions of visual consistency.</p>