Frama-C is a source code analysis platform that aims at conducting verification of industrial-size C programs. It provides its users with a collection of plug-ins that perform static analysis, deductive verification, and testing, for safety- and security-critical software. Collaborative verification across cooperating plug-ins is enabled by their integration on top of a shared kernel and datastructures, and their compliance to a common specification language. This foundational article presents a consolidated view of the platform, its main and composite analyses, and some of its industrial achievements.

Automatic test data generation (ATG) is a major topic in software engineering. In this paper, we seek to bridge the gap between the coverage criteria supported by symbolic ATG tools and the most advanced coverage criteria found in the literature. We define a new testing criterion, label coverage, and prove it to be both expressive and amenable to efficient automation. We propose several innovative techniques resulting in an effective black-box support for label coverage, while a direct approach induces an exponential blow-up of the search space. Initial experiments show that ATG for label coverage can be achieved at a reasonable cost and that our optimisations yield very significant savings.

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In software testing, coverage criteria specify the requirements to be covered by the test cases. However, in practice such criteria are limited due to the well-known infeasibility problem, which concerns elements/requirements that cannot be covered by any test case. To deal with this issue we revisit and improve state-of-the-art static analysis techniques, such as Value Analysis and Weakest Precondition calculus. We propose a lightweight greybox scheme for combining these two techniques in a complementary way. In particular we focus on detecting infeasible test requirements in an automatic and sound way for condition coverage, multiple condition coverage and weak mutation testing criteria. Experimental results show that our method is capable of detecting almost all the infeasible test requirements, 95% on average, in a reasonable amount of time, i.e., less than 40 seconds, making it practical for unit testing.

Various combinations of static and dynamic analysis techniques were recently shown to be beneficial for software verification. A frequent obstacle to combining different tools in a completely automatic way is the lack of a common specification language. Our work proposes to translate a Pre-Post based specification into executable C code. This paper presents E-ACSL, subset of the ACSL specification language for C programs, and its automatic translator into C implemented as a FRAMA-C plug-in. The resulting C code is executable and can be used by a dynamic analysis tool. We illustrate how the PATHCRAWLER test generation tool automatically treats such pre-and postconditions specified as C functions.

Recent research proposed efficient methods for software verification combining static and dynamic analysis, where static analysis reports possible runtime errors (some of which may be false alarms) and test generation confirms or rejects them. However, test generation may time out on real-sized programs before confirming some alarms as real bugs or rejecting some others as unreachable.To overcome this problem, we propose to reduce the source code by program slicing before test generation. This paper presents new optimized and adaptive usages of program slicing, provides underlying theoretical results and the algorithm these usages rely on. The method is implemented in a tool prototype called sante (Static ANalysis and TEsting). Our experiments show that our method with program slicing outperforms previous combinations of static and dynamic analysis. Moreover, simplifying the program makes it easier to analyze detected errors and remaining alarms.

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