"... Dynamic inference techniques have been demonstrated to provide useful support for various software engineering tasks including bug finding, test suite evaluation and improvement, and specification generation. To date, however, dynamic inference has only been used effectively on small programs under ..."
Dynamic inference techniques have been demonstrated to provide useful support for various software engineering tasks including bug finding, test suite evaluation and improvement, and specification generation. To date, however, dynamic inference has only been used effectively on small programs under controlled conditions. In this paper, we identify reasons why scaling dynamic inference techniques has proven difficult, and introduce solutions that enable a dynamic inference technique to scale to large programs and work effectively with the imperfect traces typically available in industrial scenarios. We describe our approximate inference algorithm, present and evaluate heuristics for winnowing the large number of inferred properties to a manageable set of interesting properties, and report on experiments using inferred properties. We evaluate our techniques on JBoss and the Windows kernel. Our tool is able to infer many of the properties checked by the Static Driver Verifier and leads us to discover a previously unknown bug in Windows.
"... Requirements engineering (RE) is concerned with the identification of the goals to be achieved by the envisioned system, the operationalization of such goals into services and constraints, and the assignment of responsibilities for the resulting requirements to agents such as humans, devices, a ..."
"... Abstract. The need for process support in the context of web services has triggered the development of many languages, systems, and standards. Industry has been developing software solutions and proposing standards such as BPEL, while researchers have been advocating the use of formal methods such a ..."
Abstract. The need for process support in the context of web services has triggered the development of many languages, systems, and standards. Industry has been developing software solutions and proposing standards such as BPEL, while researchers have been advocating the use of formal methods such as Petri nets and π-calculus. The languages developed for service flows, i.e., process specification languages for web services, have adopted many concepts from classical workflow management systems. As a result, these languages are rather procedural and this does not fit well with the autonomous nature of services. Therefore, we propose DecSerFlow as a Declarative Service Flow Language. Dec-SerFlow can be used to specify, enact, and monitor service flows. The language is extendible (i.e., constructs can be added without changing the engine or semantical basis) and can be used to enforce or to check the conformance of service flows. Although the language has an appealing graphical representation, it is grounded in temporal logic.
"... Applying finite-state verification techniques (e.g., model checking) to software requires that program source code be translated to a finite-state transition system that safely models program behavior. Automatically checking such a transition system for a correctness property is typically very cos ..."