In addition to the major UK contributions to research underpinning formal approaches to the specification and development of computer systems—and perhaps as a consequence of this—some significant attempts to deploy the ideas into practical environments have taken place in the United Kingdom. The authors of this article have been involved in formal methods for many years and both had contact with a significant proportion of this history. This article both lists key ideas and indicates where attempts were made to use the ideas in practice. Not all of these deployment stories have been a complete success and an attempt is made to tease out lessons that influence the probability of successful long-term changes to software engineering.

除了英国对支持计算机系统规范和开发的正式方法的研究做出重大贡献（也许是由此产生的结果）之外，英国还进行了一些将这些想法部署到实际环境中的重大尝试。本文的作者多年来一直参与形式化方法，并且都与这段历史的很大一部分有联系。本文既列出了关键思想，也指出了在实践中尝试使用这些思想的地方。并非所有这些部署故事都取得了完全的成功，并且试图梳理出影响软件工程长期成功更改概率的经验教训。