Weeks of Debugging Can Save You Hours of TLA+

Wednesday, December 09, 2020 - 12:15 pm12:55 pm

Markus A. Kuppe, Microsoft

Abstract: 

TLA+ is a language for the specification and verification of discrete systems, including concurrent and distributed algorithms. The behavior of systems is described in the form of state machines, written in a language based on mathematical set theory and temporal logic. The same language also serves to express safety and liveness properties. TLA+ is supported by tools for computer-assisted verification, including model checkers for verifying finite instances and an interactive proof system. In summary, TLA+ is a design tool to build reliable systems that don't need patching at 3 am on weekends.

In this talk, we will take the hands-on approach and study the powers of TLA+ by collectively solving a subtle concurrency issue that (as we will pretend) has brought our system down even though the system was heavily tested.

Markus A. Kuppe, Microsoft

Markus Kuppe is a Principal Research Software Development Engineer at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. As an engineer, his focus is on making spec-driven development (with TLA+) more popular among fellow engineers: This includes scaling verification to larger, real-world problems, and building tools to combine spec-driven development with established software engineering processes.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {262190,
author = {Markus A. Kuppe},
title = {Weeks of Debugging Can Save You Hours of {TLA+}},
booktitle = {SREcon20 Americas (SREcon20 Americas)},
year = {2020},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon20americas/presentation/kuppe},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = dec
}

Presentation Video