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

Thread-Modular Static Analysis for Relaxed Memory Models

We propose a memory-model-aware static program analysis method for accurately analyzing the behavior of concurrent software running on processors with weak consistency models such as x86-TSO, SPARC-PSO, and SPARC-RMO. At the center of our method is a unified framework for deciding the feasibility of inter-thread interferences to avoid propagating spurious data flows during static analysis and thus boost the performance of the static analyzer. We formulate the checking of interference feasibility as a set of Datalog rules which are both efficiently solvable and general enough to capture a range of hardware-level memory models. Compared to existing techniques, our method can significantly reduce the number of bogus alarms as well as unsound proofs. We implemented the method and evaluated it on a large set of multithreaded C programs. Our experiments showthe method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of accuracy with only moderate run-time overhead.Comment: revised version of the ESEC/FSE 2017 pape

Abstract verification and debugging of constraint logic programs

The technique of Abstract Interpretation [13] has allowed the development of sophisticated program analyses which are provably correct and practical. The semantic approximations produced by such analyses have been traditionally applied to optimization during program compilation. However, recently, novel and promising applications of semantic approximations have been proposed in the more general context of program verification and debugging [3],[10],[7]

Summary of Findings: Released Time Bible Education

Released Time Religious Education is a program started in 1914 by a public school superintendent in Gary, Indiana. The program, which was approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952, is primarily designed to teach religious education during the school day to public school students off campus with parental permission. A key by-product has been improved academic performance and the development of positive moral character among youth. While many incidents of improvement have been documented, there previously has been no major independent study of Released Time. School Ministries, Inc., a nonprofit organization that has been encouraging the expansion of Released Time nationally, engaged the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) to do an independent program evaluation in cooperation with the Oakland, California, Released Time program

A theorem-proving approach to deciding properties of finite control agents

The report presents a decision procedure for assertions in an extension of the mu-calculus about finite-control pi-calculus agents. The procedure is based on the classical cut-free sequent calculus and associated techniques of automatic theorem proving