Michael Winikoff

Michael’s work addresses a foundational question in software assurance: how do we decide what a mathematical check should establish? Towards Deriving Verification Properties proposes a systematic process for identifying those checks. For engineers and researchers working with formal verification, this offers a way to connect requirements with verification, keeping intended behaviour central to assessments of software quality.

Michael Winikoff is a Professor at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Information Management, specialising in the design and verification of agent-based software. After earlier academic appointments at the University of Otago and RMIT University, Michael joined Victoria University of Wellington in June 2019 and served as Head of School from early 2021 to early 2025.

Investigating how to bridge the gap between intended system behaviour and formal verification, Michael published the 2019 working note Towards Deriving Verification Properties to outline a process for systematically identifying verification conditions. The paper challenges the common assumption that properties to check are already known or readily supplied through requirements gathering, highlighting that verifying a property offers little assurance if the property itself fails to reflect what the software is actually meant to achieve.