Vienna Development Method

The Vienna Development Method (VDM) is one of the longest-established formal methods for the development of computer-based systems. Originating in work done at IBM's Vienna Laboratory in the 1970s, it has grown to include a group of techniques and tools based on a formal specification language - the VDM Specification Language (VDM-SL). It has an extended form, VDM++, which supports the modeling of object-oriented and concurrent systems. Support for VDM includes commercial and academic tools for analyzing models, including support for testing and proving properties of models and generating program code from validated VDM models. There is a history of industrial usage of VDM and its tools and a growing body of research in the formalism has led to notable contributions to the engineering of critical systems, compilers, concurrent systems and in logic for computer science.