Deductive program verification is a post-hoc quality assurance technique following the design-by-contract paradigm where correctness of the program is proven only after it was written. Contrary, correctness-by-construction (CbC) is an incremental program construction technique. Starting with the functional specification, the program's correctness is guaranteed by application of a small set of refinement rules. Even though CbC is supposed to lead to code with a low defect rate and improve the traceability of errors, it is not widespread. One of the main reasons is insufficient tool support which we addressed with our tool CorC. CorC provides support for CbC-based program construction with the KeY program verifier as backend prover for checking correctness of refinement rule applications. However, CorC was limited to constructing single method bodies restricting its applicability. In this work, we introduce and discuss CorC 2.0, which extends CorC's programming model with objects as used in object-oriented programming. We integrate CorC into a development process that allows to use posthoc verification and CbC interchangeably to construct correct programs, and scale the applicability of CbC on the architectural level in our tool extension ArchiCorC. We developed three object-oriented case studies and evaluated the verification effort and the usability of CorC in comparison to post-hoc verification.
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Correctness-by-Construction (CbC) is an incremental software development technique in the field of formal methods to create functionally correct programs guided by a specification. In contrast to post-hoc verification, where the specification and verification take part after implementing a program, with CbC the specification is defined first, and then the program is successively created using a small set of refinement rules that define side conditions preserving the correctness of the program. This specification-first, refinement-based approach as pursued by CbC has the advantage that errors are likely to be detected earlier in the design process and can be tracked more easily. Even though the idea of CbC emerged over 40 years ago, CbC is not widespread and is mostly used to create small algorithms.We believe in the idea of CbC and envision a scaled CbC approach that contributes to solving problems of modern software verification. In this short paper, we give an overview of our research regarding CbC in four different lines of research. For all of them, we provide tool support for building the CorC ecosystem that even further enables CbC-based development for different fields of application and size of software systems. Furthermore, we give an outlook on future work that extends on our concepts for CbC.
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