Guess and Verify - Back to the Future

The problem addressed in this paper is the increasing time and cost of developing critical software. In particular the tried and trusted software development processes for safety critical software are becoming untenable because of the costs involved. Model Based Development, in the general, offers a solution to reducing time and cost in software development. Unfortunately the requirement of independence of verification can negate any gains and indeed lead to more cost. The approach advocated in this paper is to employ the "guess and verify" paradigm in the context of automatic code generation to enable automated verification that is independent of the code generation. The approach is illustrated by the development of an automated verification capability for a commercial automatic code generator. A research topic on metadata for automatic code generators is suggested.