Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Volume 27, Issue 2, Pages 99-123Publisher
IEEE COMPUTER SOC
DOI: 10.1109/32.908957
Keywords
program invariants; formal specification; software evolution; dynamic analysis; execution traces; logical inference; pattern recognition
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Explicitly stated program invariants can help programmers by identifying program properties that must be preserved when modifying code. In practice, however, these invariants are usually implicit. An alternative to expecting programmers to fully annotate code with invariants is to automatically infer likely invariants from the program itself. This research focuses on dynamic techniques for discovering invariants from execution traces. This article reports three results. First, it describes techniques for dynamically discovering invariants, along with an implementation, named Daikon, that embodies these techniques. Second, it reports on the application of Daikon to two sets of target programs. In programs from Gries's work on program derivation, the system rediscovered predefined invariants. In a C program lacking explicit invariants, the system discovered invariants that assisted a software evolution task. These experiments demonstrate that, at least for small programs, invariant inference is both accurate and useful. Third, it analyzes scalability issues, such as invariant detection runtime and accuracy, as functions of test suites and program points instrumented.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available