Syntactic methods

Often, syntactic methods are used when formal methods are not an option. In non-mission-critical systems, formal methods may prove to be too expensive for the benefit they provide. The costs of modelling, personnel, execution, and development may often outweight the benefits gained by preventing possible failures.

Syntactic methods are often a simpler, and more importantly, cheaper alternative to formal methods. This approach revolves around the use of a abstract dependency graph which is created from the system in question.