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Online Teaching of Verification of C Programs in Applied Computer Science

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Formal Methods Teaching (FMTea 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 13122))

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Abstract

This is a report on teaching formal methods in the form of program verification for Master students in an applied computer science setting. The course was taught fully online, using recorded videos, synchronous sessions, the learning management system Moodle (https://moodle.org/), a distributed version control system and mostly biweekly graded practical assignments.

The first objective was to use the C language. It is a very relevant language in the sectors where verification is used in industry. The students already know the language, it also has interesting properties which can make verification challenging and shows the importance of edge cases in verification. The second objective was to teach the use of mature, industrial-strength tools in order to make the skills transferable to the later work situation of the students. This required tools that are actually used in industry to analyze C programs. The third objective was to introduce different verification approaches and to show the strengths and potential limitations of each. The selected approaches were deductive verification, abstract interpretation and model checking.

To achieve these goals, Frama-C with its WP and EVA plugin, the model checker CBMC and the Z3 SMT solver were selected. Because of the applied setting it was desired to use examples which did not require the use of interactive theorem proving for deductive verification.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://classroom.github.com.

  2. 2.

    https://rocket.chat/.

  3. 3.

    https://jitsi.org/.

  4. 4.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/code/game/q_math.c.

  6. 6.

    https://guedemann.org/downloads/Evaluierung_Programmverifikation.pdf.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/sukrutrao/IntervalAI.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Munich, Munich, Germany

    Matthias Güdemann

Authors
  1. Matthias Güdemann
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Correspondence to Matthias Güdemann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. INESC-ID & IST, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    João F. Ferreira

  2. INESC TEC and University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal

    Alexandra Mendes

  3. McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Claudio Menghi

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Güdemann, M. (2021). Online Teaching of Verification of C Programs in Applied Computer Science. In: Ferreira, J.F., Mendes, A., Menghi, C. (eds) Formal Methods Teaching. FMTea 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91550-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91550-6_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-91549-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91550-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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