The AutoProof Verifier: Usability by Non-Experts and on Standard Code

Formal verification tools are often developed by experts for experts; as a result, their usability by programmers with little formal methods experience may be severely limited. In this paper, we discuss this general phenomenon with reference to AutoProof: a tool that can verify the full functional correctness of object-oriented software. In particular, we present our experiences of using AutoProof in two contrasting contexts representative of non-expert usage. First, we discuss its usability by students in a graduate course on software verification, who were tasked with verifying implementations of various sorting algorithms. Second, we evaluate its usability in verifying code developed for programming assignments of an undergraduate course. The first scenario represents usability by serious non-experts; the second represents usability on "standard code", developed without full functional verification in mind. We report our experiences and lessons learnt, from which we derive some general suggestions for furthering the development of verification tools with respect to improving their usability.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

AutoProof meets some verification challenges

AutoProof is an automatic verifier for functional properties of programs written in Eiffel. This paper illustrates some of AutoProof’s capabilities when tackling the three challenges of the VerifyThis verification competition held at FM 2012, as well as on three other problems proposed in related events. AutoProof ’s design focuses on making it practically applicable with reduced user effort. Tackling the challenges demonstrates to what extent this design goal is met in the current implementation: while some of AutoProof’s current limitations prevent us from verifying the complete specification of the prefix sum and binary search tree algorithms, we can still prove some partial properties on interesting special cases, but with the advantage of requiring little or no specification.ISSN:1433-2779ISSN:1433-278