& This article presents a novel application of grammatical inference techniques to the synthesis of behavior models of software systems. This synthesis is used for the elicitation of software requirements. This problem is formulated as a deterministic finite-state automaton induction problem from positive and negative scenarios provided by an end user of the software-to-be. A query-driven state merging (QSM) algorithm is proposed. It extends the Regular Positive and Negative Inference (RPNI) and blue-fringe algorithms by allowing membership queries to be submitted to the end user. State merging operations can be further constrained by some prior domain knowledge formulated as fluents, goals, domain properties, and models of external software components. The incorporation of domain knowledge both reduces the number of queries and guarantees that the induced model is consistent with such knowledge. The proposed techniques are implemented in the ISIS tool and practical evaluations on standard requirements engineering test cases and synthetic data illustrate the interest of this approach.
Models play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of software systems, but are often neglected during the development process due to the considerable manual effort required to produce them. In response to this problem, numerous techniques have been developed that seek to automate the model generation task with the aid of increasingly accurate algorithms from the domain of Machine Learning. From an empirical perspective, these are extremely challenging to compare; there are many factors that are difficult to control (e.g. the richness of the input and the complexity of subject systems), and numerous practical issues that are just as troublesome (e.g. tool availability). This paper describes the StaMinA (State Machine Inference Approaches) competiton, that was designed to address these This work is supported by the EPSRC STAMINA project (EP/H002456/1), the EPSRC REGI project (EP/F065825/1), the Regional Government of Wallonia (GISELE project, RW Conv. 616425) (2013) 18:791-824 problems. The competition attracted numerous submissions, many of which were improved or adapted versions of techniques that had not been subjected to extensive empirical evaluations, and had not been evaluated with respect to their ability to infer models of software systems. This paper shows how many of these techniques substantially improve on the state of the art, providing insights into some of the factors that could underpin the success of the best techniques. In a more general sense it demonstrates the potential for competitions to act as a useful basis for empirical software engineering by (a) spurring the development of new techniques and (b) facilitating their comparative evaluation to an extent that would usually be prohibitively challenging without the active participation of the developers.
Abstract. Standard state-merging DFA induction algorithms, such as RPNI or Blue-Fringe, aim at inferring a regular language from positive and negative strings. In particular, the negative information prevents merging incompatible states: merging those states would lead to produce an inconsistent DFA. Whenever available, domain knowledge can also be used to extend the set of incompatible states. We introduce here mandatory merge constraints, which form the logical counterpart to the usual incompatibility constraints. We show how state-merging algorithms can benefit from these new constraints. Experiments following the Abbadingo contest protocol illustrate the interest of using mandatory merge constraints. As a side effect, this paper also points out an interesting property of statemerging techniques: they can be extended to take any pair of DFAs as inputs rather than simple strings.
This paper describes the STAMINA competition 1 , which is designed to drive the evaluation and improvement of software model-inference approaches. To this end, the target models have certain characteristics that tend to appear in software-models; they have large alphabets, and states are not evenly connected by transitions (as has been the case in previous similar competitions). The paper describes the set-up of the competition that extends previous similar competitions in the field of regular grammar inference. However, this competition focusses on target models that are characteristic of software systems, and features a suitably adapted protocol for the generation of training and testing samples. Besides providing details of the competition itself, it also discusses how outcomes from the competition will be used to gain broader insights into the relative accuracy and efficiency of competing techniques.
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