FAQ - What strategy increases the chance of adop-tion of formal methods?

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 * Theme: Migration to a Formalism (MF)
 * Role: PQAM

Answer
We sketch here some approaches used by some DEPLOY partners within the project to increase the chance of internal adoption of the project results. There are different strategies but the key is to keep the operational level in the loop.

Building an early partnership between R&D and operations
This strategy is more adapted to larger organisations with a dedicated R&D department. In order to build bridges on which transfers can take place at some point, partnership should be build early with development units and ideally should be motivated by need from the development units. Interesting collaboration points are:
 * collecting therequirements
 * getting early feedback
 * conducting validation experiments

The organisation should explicitly support the process by providing required resources and collaboration instruments. The prioritization of the R&D e�ffort should also be then driven by the development team's requirements priority. This can lead to some consequence such as having to improve usability of the prototypes becoming as important as investigating advanced concepts and delivering missing functionality. However this is the price to pay to convince development units that the resulting tools has reached the necessary technical maturity for a productive use.

This strategy was followed by SAP within DEPLOY

Having turn-over on the R&D project
Another strategy more adapted for companies of smaller size and greater flexibility is to give a chance to a maximum number of people to get in contact with the project, some consistent actions to achieve this are to:
 * parly renew the team at some interesting point of the project, for example for a second pilot, for a new lifecycle phase requiring a specific profile (e.g. code generation, test generation...)
 * have the initial set of people becoming trainers/advisors for a second wave of engineers

This strategy was followed by SSF within DEPLOY. To give an idea, about on third of the company had his hands on the project at some point.