What works (and doesn't) selling formal methods

This article began life as a talk I gave in late 2024. I love formal methods—I should say that to begin with, because this article is mostly about what doesn’t work when trying to do FM projects. Over the last 20 years, formal methods have grown and grown, and I’m proud to say that Galois has made its own contributions to this success. I made a lot of mistakes when I was scoping and running formal methods projects. I’d like other people to avoid the pitfalls I fell into, and hopefully make bigger and more interesting mistakes. Over my years at Galois I’ve been on a lot of sales calls. I didn’t expect this - I thought I was going to work on industry applications of formal methods. But it turns out that doing research for industry requires first actually finding industry projects, and that involves sales calls. The result is I’ve talked to a lot of people who might, just might, want to do a project with Galois. Here’s a prototypical interaction: This kind of conversation can go two wa ... Read full article.