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International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods

ICFEM 2006: Formal Methods and Software Engineering pp 717–736Cite as

Discovering Likely Method Specifications

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4260))

Abstract

Software specifications are of great use for more rigorous software development. They are useful for formal verification and automated testing, and they improve program understanding. In practice, specifications often do not exist and developers write software in an ad-hoc fashion. We describe a new way to automatically infer specifications from code. Our approach infers a likely specification for any method such that the method’s behavior, i.e., its effect on the state and possible result values, is summarized and expressed in terms of some other methods. We use symbolic execution to analyze and relate the behaviors of the considered methods. In our experiences, the resulting likely specifications are compact and human-understandable. They can be examined by the user, used as input to program verification systems, or as input for test generation tools for validation. We implemented the technique for .NET programs in a tool called Axiom Meister. It inferred concise specifications for base classes of the .NET platform and found flaws in the design of a new library.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, USA

    Nikolai Tillmann & Wolfram Schulte

  2. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Feng Chen

Authors
  1. Nikolai Tillmann
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  2. Feng Chen
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  3. Wolfram Schulte
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. International Institute of Software Technology, United Nations University, Macau, China

    Zhiming Liu

  2. Software Engineering Institute, East China Normal University, 200062, Shanghai, China

    Jifeng He

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Tillmann, N., Chen, F., Schulte, W. (2006). Discovering Likely Method Specifications. In: Liu, Z., He, J. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4260. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11901433_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11901433_39

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-47460-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47462-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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