Abstract The comprehensive functionality and nontrivial design of realistic general-purpose container libraries pose challenges to formal verification that go beyond those of individual benchmark problems mainly targeted by the state of the art. We present our experience verifying the full functional correctness of EiffelBase2: a container library offering all the features customary in modern language frameworks, such as external iterators, and hash tables with generic mutable keys and load balancing. Verification uses the automated deductive verifier AutoProof, which we extended as part of the present work. Our results indicate that verification of a realistic container library (135 public methods, 8400 LOC) is possible with moderate annotation overhead (1.4 lines of specification per LOC) and good performance (0.2 s per method on average).

Software projects have crossed seas and continents looking for talented developers, moving from local developments to geographically distributed projects. This paper presents a case study analyzing the effect of distribution and time zones on communication in distributed projects. The study was performed in a university course during two semesters, where students developed projects jointly with teams located in ten different countries in South America, Europe, and Asia. The study compares the results of the projects distributed in two locations with projects distributed in three locations. It also analyzes projects in different time zone ranges. The initial results show that the amount of communication in projects distributed in two locations is bigger than the communication in projects distributed in three locations. We also found that projects in closer time zones have more communication than projects in farther time zones. Furthermore, we analyze the reply time for e-mails of projects distributed in different time zones, and discuss the challenges faced by the students during these projects.