A Historical Perspective on Runtime Assertion Checking in Software Development

This report presents initial results in the area of software testing and analysis produced as part of the Software Engineering Impact Project. The report describes the historical development of runtime assertion checking, including a description of the origins of and significant features associated with assertion checking mechanisms, and initial findings about current industrial use. A future report will provide a more comprehensive assessment of development practice, for which we invite readers of this report to contribute information

Sound and Automated Synthesis of Digital Stabilizing Controllers for Continuous Plants

Modern control is implemented with digital microcontrollers, embedded within a dynamical plant that represents physical components. We present a new algorithm based on counter-example guided inductive synthesis that automates the design of digital controllers that are correct by construction. The synthesis result is sound with respect to the complete range of approximations, including time discretization, quantization effects, and finite-precision arithmetic and its rounding errors. We have implemented our new algorithm in a tool called DSSynth, and are able to automatically generate stable controllers for a set of intricate plant models taken from the literature within minutes.Comment: 10 page

Syntactic-Semantic Form of Mizar Articles

Mizar Mathematical Library is most appreciated for the wealth of mathematical knowledge it contains. However, accessing this publicly available huge corpus of formalized data is not straightforward due to the complexity of the underlying Mizar language, which has been designed to resemble informal mathematical papers. For this reason, most systems exploring the library are based on an internal XML representation format used by semantic modules of Mizar. This representation is easily accessible, but it lacks certain syntactic information available only in the original human-readable Mizar source files. In this paper we propose a new XML-based format which combines both syntactic and semantic data. It is intended to facilitate various applications of the Mizar library requiring fullest possible information to be retrieved from the formalization files

Software development tools: A bibliography, appendix C.

A bibliography containing approximately 200 citations on tools which help software developers perform some development task (such as text manipulation, testing, etc.), and which would not necessarily be found as part of a computing facility is given. The bibliography comes from a relatively random sampling of the literature and is not complete. But it is indicative of the nature and range of tools currently being prepared or currently available