Program Model Checking as a New Trend

This paper introduces a special section of STTT (International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer) containing a selection of papers that were presented at the 7th International SPIN workshop, Stanford, August 30 - September 1, 2000. The workshop was named SPIN Model Checking and Software Verification, with an emphasis on model checking of programs. The paper outlines the motivation for stressing software verification, rather than only design and model verification, by presenting the work done in the Automated Software Engineering group at NASA Ames Research Center within the last 5 years. This includes work in software model checking, testing like technologies and static analysis.