The software industry has a long-standing and well-earned reputation for failing to deliver on its promises and it is clear that still nowadays, even considering the current technologies, the success of software projects is often not guaranteed. Many of the approaches used for large complex problems have not been able to assure the correct behavior of the delivered software, despite the efforts of the (often very qualified and skilled) software engineers involved. This is where formal methods have a significant opportunity. In fact, formal methods are intended to provide the means for greater precision in both thinking and documenting the preliminary stage of the software creation process. When done well, this can aid all aspects of software creation: user requirement formulation, implementation, verification/testing, and the creation of documentation.

However, after decades of research, and despite significant advancement, formal methods are still not widely used in industrial software development. We believe that software engineering might help in making formal methods more easily applicable in the development of software applications, integrable into development processes, and in making more evident the return on investment (ROI) in using them.

The main goal of the conference is to foster integration between the formal methods and the software engineering communities with the purpose to examine the link between the two more carefully than is currently the case.