Abstract
It is widely recognized that human input is indispensable in deductive verification of real-world code. Verification engineers have to guide the proof search and provide information reflecting their insight into the workings of the program. Lately we have seen a shift towards an annotation-based paradigm – sometimes called “verifying compiler” –, where this information is provided in the form of program annotations instead of interactively during proof construction.
Suspicions have been growing recently that expressing verification knowledge as annotations in their current form suffers from serious scalability and maintainability issues.
In this paper, we pinpoint some of the biggest neuralgic spots and provide recommendations to the designers of annotation-based verification systems aimed to improve usability of specification languages and methods and, thus, the tool’s productivity. We clarify the different purposes that annotations can serve and show why a certain class of annotations that are not program requirements is currently indispensable for proof construction. Moreover, we discuss how the use of data abstractions can be improved in annotation-based specifications.
Work partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the framework of the Verisoft XT project under grant 01 IS 07008 H. The responsibility for this article lies with the authors.
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Beckert, B., Bormer, T., Klebanov, V. (2011). Improving the Usability of Specification Languages and Methods for Annotation-Based Verification. In: Aichernig, B.K., de Boer, F.S., Bonsangue, M.M. (eds) Formal Methods for Components and Objects. FMCO 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6957. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25271-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25271-6_4
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