Testing Library Specifications by Verifying Conformance Tests

Abstract. Formal specifications of standard libraries are necessary when statically verifying software that uses those libraries. Library specifications must be both correct, accurately reflecting library behavior, and useful, describing library behavior in sufficient detail to allow static verification of client programs. Specification and verification researchers regularly face the question of whether the library specifications we use are correct and useful, and we have collectively provided no good answers. Over the past few years we have created and refined a software engineering process, which we call the Formal CTD Process (FCTD), to address this problem. Although FCTD is primarily targeted toward those who write Java libraries (or specifications for existing Java libraries) using the Java Modeling Language (JML), its techniques are broadly applicable. The key to FCTD is its novel usage of library conformance test suites. Rather than executing the conformance tests, FCTD uses them to measure the correctness and utility of specifications through static verification. FCTD is beginning to see significant use within the JML community and is the cornerstone process of the JML Spec-a-thons, meetings that bring JML researchers and practitioners together for intensive specification writing sessions. This article describes the Formal CTD Process, its use in small case studies, and its broad application to the standard Java class library.

Metamodel-based model conformance and multiview consistency checking

Model-driven development, using languages such as UML and BON, often makes use of multiple diagrams (e.g., class and sequence diagrams) when modeling systems. These diagrams, presenting different views of a system of interest, may be inconsistent. A metamodel provides a unifying framework in which to ensure and check consistency, while at the same time providing the means to distinguish between valid and invalid models, that is, conformance. Two formal specifications of the metamodel for an object-oriented modeling language are presented, and it is shown how to use these specifications for model conformance and multiview consistency checking. Comparisons are made in terms of completeness and the level of automation each provide for checking multiview consistency and model conformance. The lessons learned from applying formal techniques to the problems of metamodeling, model conformance, and multiview consistency checking are summarized

An automated model-based test oracle for access control systems

In the context of XACML-based access control systems, an intensive testing activity is among the most adopted means to assure that sensible information or resources are correctly accessed. Unfortunately, it requires a huge effort for manual inspection of results: thus automated verdict derivation is a key aspect for improving the cost-effectiveness of testing. To this purpose, we introduce XACMET, a novel approach for automated model-based oracle definition. XACMET defines a typed graph, called the XAC-Graph, that models the XACML policy evaluation. The expected verdict of a specific request execution can thus be automatically derived by executing the corresponding path in such graph. Our validation of the XACMET prototype implementation confirms the effectiveness of the proposed approach.Comment: 7 page

Metamodel Instance Generation: A systematic literature review

Modelling and thus metamodelling have become increasingly important in Software Engineering through the use of Model Driven Engineering. In this paper we present a systematic literature review of instance generation techniques for metamodels, i.e. the process of automatically generating models from a given metamodel. We start by presenting a set of research questions that our review is intended to answer. We then identify the main topics that are related to metamodel instance generation techniques, and use these to initiate our literature search. This search resulted in the identification of 34 key papers in the area, and each of these is reviewed here and discussed in detail. The outcome is that we are able to identify a knowledge gap in this field, and we offer suggestions as to some potential directions for future research.Comment: 25 page