A significant number of parallel applications are implemented using MPI (Message Passing Interface) and several existing approaches focus on their verification. However, these approaches typically work with complete applications and fixing any undesired behaviour at this late stage of application development is difficult and time consuming. To address this problem, we present a lightweight formal approach that helps developers build safety into the MPI applications from the early stages of the program development. Our approach consists of a methodology that includes verification during the program development process. We provide tools that hide the more difficult formal aspects from developers making it possible to verify properties such as freedom from deadlock as well as automatically generating partial skeletons of the code. We evaluate our approach with respect to its ability and efficiency in detecting deadlocks.