Using formal methods to support testing

Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing

Genetic Programming + Proof Search = Automatic Improvement

Search Based Software Engineering techniques are emerging as important tools for software maintenance. Foremost among these is Genetic Improvement, which has historically applied the stochastic techniques of Genetic Programming to optimize pre-existing program code. Previous work in this area has not generally preserved program semantics and this article describes an alternative to the traditional mutation operators used, employing deterministic proof search in the sequent calculus to yield semantics-preserving transformations on algebraic data types. Two case studies are described, both of which are applicable to the recently-introduced `grow and graft' technique of Genetic Improvement: the first extends the expressiveness of the `grafting' phase and the second transforms the representation of a list data type to yield an asymptotic efficiency improvement

Automating Exersises Validation in e-Learning Environments

E-learning is supposing an innovation in teaching, raising from the development of new technologies. It is based in a set of educational resources, including, among others, multimedia or interactive contents accessible through Internet or Intranet networks. A whole spectrum of tools and services support e-learning, some of them include auto-evaluation and automated correction of test-like exercises, however, this sort of exercises are very constrained because of its nature: fixed contents and correct answers suppose a limit in the way teachers may evaluation students. In this paper we propose a new engine that allows validating complex exercises in the area of Data Structures and Algorithms. Correct solutions to exercises do not rely only in how good the execution of the code is, or if the results are same as expected. A set of criteria on algorithm complexity or correctness in the use of the data structures are required. The engine presented in this work covers a wide set of exercises with these characteristics allowing teachers to establish the set of requirements for a solution, and students to obtain a measure on the quality of their solution in the same terms that are later required for exams

Testing Implementations of Algebraic Specifications with Design-by-Contract Tools

We present an approach for testing Java implementations of abstract data types (ADTs) against their specifications. The key idea is to reduce this problem to the run-time monitoring of contract annotated classes, which is supported today by several runtime assertion-checking tools. The approach comprises an ADT specification language that allows automatic generation of monitorable contracts and a refinement language that supports the specification of the details of object-oriented implementations of ADT

Automatic generation of the cases derived from algebraic specifications

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Testing abstract behavioral specifications

We present a range of testing techniques for the Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) language and apply them to an industrial case study. ABS is a formal modeling language for highly variable, concurrent, component-based systems. The nature of these systems makes them susceptible to the introduction of subtle bugs that are hard to detect in the presence of steady adaptation. While static analysis techniques are available for an abstract language such as ABS, testing is still indispensable and complements analytic methods. We focus on fully automated testing techniques including black-box and glass-box test generation as well as runtime assertion checking, which are shown to be effective in an industrial setting

Testing abstract behavioral specifications

We present a range of testing techniques for the Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) language and apply them to an industrial case study. ABS is a formal modeling language for highly variable, concurrent, component-based systems. The nature of these systems makes them susceptible to the introduction of subtle bugs that are hard to detect in the presence of steady adaptation. While static analysis techniques are available for an abstract language such as ABS, testing is still indispensable and complements analytic methods. We focus on fully automated testing techniques including blackbox and glassbox test generation as well as runtime assertion checking, which are shown to be effective in an industrial setting

An Extended Stable Marriage Problem Algorithm for Clone Detection

Code cloning negatively affects industrial software and threatens intellectual property. This paper presents a novel approach to detecting cloned software by using a bijective matching technique. The proposed approach focuses on increasing the range of similarity measures and thus enhancing the precision of the detection. This is achieved by extending a well-known stable-marriage problem (SMP) and demonstrating how matches between code fragments of different files can be expressed. A prototype of the proposed approach is provided using a proper scenario, which shows a noticeable improvement in several features of clone detection such as scalability and accuracy.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 6 table

The 1st Verified Software Competition, Extended Experience Report

We, the organizers and participants, report our experiences from the 1st Veried Software Competition, held in August 2010 in Edinburgh at the VSTTE 2010 conferenc