Vienna Development Method (VDM) is set of techniques for developing computer systems. It originated from IBM's Vienna Laboratory in the mid-1970s, developed by Cliff Jones and Dines Bjorner. VDM includes a specification language called VDM-SL (VDM specification language).


After the development of VDM in the 1970s there were a few tools for checking VDM specifications, but these were mostly informal projects. In 1988 Peter Froome developed a tool called SpecBox which was the first industrialised tool for checking VDM specification. SpecBox is used in civil nuclear, railway and security applications. There are many other tools for checking VDM specification such as IFAD VDM-SL and Centaur-VDM environment which is an interactive and graphical tool for VDM. However unlike Alloy these do not provide fully automatic analysis in the style of a model checker. Both Alloy and VDM support object-orientation and concurrency.

Although it is one of the first formal methods in development, it has been refined, standardized and is still widely used in industry by such organisations as British Aerospace Systems & Equipment, Rolls Royce and Dutch Department of Defence. Alloy is not used as much in industry as VDM.