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AutoProof: auto-active functional verification of object-oriented programs

  • TACAS 2015
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Abstract

Auto-active verifiers provide a level of automation intermediate between fully automatic and interactive: users supply code with annotations as input while benefiting from a high level of automation in the back-end. This paper presents AutoProof, a state-of-the-art auto-active verifier for object-oriented sequential programs with complex functional specifications. AutoProof fully supports advanced object-oriented features and a powerful methodology for framing and class invariants, which make it applicable in practice to idiomatic object-oriented patterns. The paper focuses on describing AutoProof ’s interface, design, and implementation features, and demonstrates AutoProof ’s performance on a rich collection of benchmark problems. The results attest AutoProof ’s competitiveness among tools in its league on cutting-edge functional verification of object-oriented programs.

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Notes

  1. Although inter-matic would be as good a name.

  2. Maintaining invariants is the default, which can be overridden; see Sect. 4.5 for details.

  3. Overflow checking can be disabled to treat integers as mathematical integers.

  4. As usual, modulo bugs in the implementation.

  5. Somewhat similarly to other verification techniques like bounded model checking [9].

  6. Even though class

    figure cd

    does not explicitly define any other model attributes, such attributes might be added in descendant classes; in addition, the invariant methodology described below equips each class with implicit model attributes

    figure ce

    ,

    figure cf

    , and

    figure cg

    .

  7. While the names are inspired by the observer pattern, they are applicable also to many other collaboration patterns, as we extensively demonstrated in related work [41, 42].

  8. This default is inspired by VCC’s static owns [10].

  9. Since they are immutable, logic classes do not include state-modifying commands.

  10. In accordance with common practices in verification competitions, we count tokens for the s/c ratio; but we provide other measures in lines, which are more naturally understandable.

  11. See the course’s homepage at http://se.inf.ethz.ch/courses/2014b_fall/sv/.

  12. A simple way to implement support of this kind could build atop Boogie’s smoke testing functionality.

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Correspondence to Nadia Polikarpova.

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A preliminary version of this work appeared in the 21st International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems in 2015 [50].

Julian Tschannen: work mainly done while all the authors were affiliated with ETH Zurich.

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Furia, C.A., Nordio, M., Polikarpova, N. et al. AutoProof: auto-active functional verification of object-oriented programs. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 19, 697–716 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-016-0419-0

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