It is virtually impossible to guarantee the correctness of a system, and in turn the absense of bugs by standard software engineering practice such as code review, systematic testing and good software design alone. The formal methods community has developed various rigorous, mathematically sound techniques and tools that allow the automatic analysis of systems and software. The application of these fully automatic techniques is typically called algorithmic verification.

The course will describe several automatic verification techniques, the algoriths they are based on, and the tools that support them. We will discuss examples to which the techniques have been applied, and provide experience with the use of several tools.