Over the years, I’ve formed a few opinions about what works when trying to scope formal methods projects. Many potential formal methods projects don’t make sense in terms of cost/benefit tradeoffs. 1: Projects Have to Deliver Value EarlyI quite quickly realized that formal methods projects don’t happen in one giant leap. The first approach (which I call gold plating) is you only apply formal methods after you’ve used all the other, cheaper methods exhaustively. The second approach (which I call YOLO because I’m extremely cool) is to say that actually formal methods can replace all the other cheaper methods.