Sobel, Ann2008-07-222013-07-102008-07-222013-07-101996-11-012008-03-17http://hdl.handle.net/2374.MIA/208Despite thirty years of study by the academic community, industry has not embraced the systematic usage of formal methods. To address this concern, a formal method is proposed which possesses many of the qualities that practitioners have listed as lacking from current formal methods: inclusion of both a specification and verification model, a tabular notation that only requires knowledge of first-order logic, support for both composition and decomposition, application throughout the software life-cycle, and tool support. The presentation includes several applications to safety-critical software systems. Keywords and Phrases Formal methods, specification, trace-based systems, software development, concurrency, verification.Text