formalWARE was a two-year collaborative industry/university research project. It began in April 1996 and gradually came to completion in the last half of 1998. This project was sponsored by the BC Advanced Systems Institute (BC ASI), Raytheon Systems Canada Ltd. (Raytheon) and MacDonald Dettwiler (MDA). It involved the participation of faculty and students from the University of British Columbia and University of Victoria. Many of the students involved in this project have completed their studies and have begun new affiliations with other organizations such as Intrepid Critical Software Inc. and the Oregon Graduate Institute.

This project was funded to investigate potential applications of formal methods in the development of software-intensive, critical systems. The research scope of this project included: requirements specification and validation, requirements-based, system level testing, software component engineering, and system safety engineering.

The achievements of the formalWARE project were reviewed by an independent panel in May 1998. The panel's report includes an insightful summary of the project results from an external perspective. It is complemented by an internal perspective of the project in an overview written by the project director, Dr. Jeffrey Joyce. A brochure prepared in March 1998 provides a quick reference to many aspects of the project.