Debugging temporal specifications with concept analysis

Ammons, Glenn; Mandelin, David; Bodík, Rastislav; Larus, James R.

doi:10.1145/781151.781152

Cited by 24 publications

(38 citation statements)

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“…Inferno continuously monitors the signals in the target interface, extracting transactions as they occur in the simulation. When a new transaction is observed, it is visualized and presented to the user for approval, either manually or with the assistance of a specification aggregator such as [3]. At this point, an engineer can evaluate the transaction and determine whether it corresponds to a specified behavior for the system.…”

Section: Transactional Verification With Infernomentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferno: Streamlining Verification With Inferred Semantics

DeOrio

Bauserman

Bertacco

et al. 2009

IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.

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Abstract-Understanding designers' intentions and accurately verifying a design are major obstacles for verification engineers today. Currently available debugging tools, such as waveform viewers, are unwieldy, often requiring the user to search through millions of cycles of logic simulation data to locate a problem. In this paper, we present Inferno, a novel solution capable of automatically extracting semantic information from a design's interface from simulation information. The semantic structure of an interface's communication protocol is presented to the user as a set of transactions, that is, monolithic communication units that have typically been observed several times during the logic simulation. Transactions can graphically be presented to the user and used as an aid to understand and validate the communication protocol of a design's interface. In addition, approved transactions can also be encoded as assertions expressed in a hardware description language (HDL) and used in constrained-random simulation to certify that the interface protocol adheres to the set of observed (and user-approved) transactions. Moreover, we developed a new closed-loop verification methodology based on Inferno, called transactional verification, which leverages approved transactions to describe correct design behavior. In our methodology, transactions are concurrently extracted during a constraint-based random simulation: the anomalous ones are flagged as potentially buggy and presented to the user for inspection. In the experimental results, we evaluate the performance and the quality of the results of Inferno on a broad range of testbench designs and several of their interfaces, including a number of communication intellectual properties and the OpenSPARC T1 8-core processor from Sun.

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Section: Transactional Verification With Infernomentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferno: Streamlining Verification With Inferred Semantics

DeOrio

Bauserman

Bertacco

et al. 2009

IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.

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“…Such scenarios are fed to a probabilistic finite state machine learner. The output of the learner, a single policy, is minimized and may further be "cored" by removing infrequently traversed edges or "debugged" and simplified with the user's help [3]. WML-Static.…”

Section: Other Specification Mining Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining Temporal Specifications for Error Detection

Weimer

Necula

2005

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

203

192

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Abstract. Specifications are necessary in order to find software bugs using program verification tools. This paper presents a novel automatic specification mining algorithm that uses information about error handling to learn temporal safety rules. Our algorithm is based on the observation that programs often make mistakes along exceptional control-flow paths, even when they behave correctly on normal execution paths. We show that this focus improves the effectiveness of the miner for discovering specifications beneficial for bug finding.We present quantitative results comparing our technique to four existing miners. We highlight assumptions made by various miners that are not always born out in practice. Additionally, we apply our algorithm to existing Java programs and analyze its ability to learn specifications that find bugs in those programs. In our experiments, we find filtering candidate specifications to be more important than ranking them. We find 430 bugs in 1 million lines of code. Notably, we find 250 more bugs using per-program specifications learned by our algorithm than with generic specifications that apply to all programs.

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“…Additionally, the work described in Eisenbarth01aiding [5], Eisenbarth01feature [6] and Eisenbarth01aiding [7] has also been categorised as Architectural Design. The papers Ammons03debugging [2] and Ball99concept [3] incorporate Testing and these are the only 2 papers in the survey to address this activity. Bojic00reverse [4] discusses an application to round-trip engineering and recovering UML use-cases.…”

Section: Iso12207 Categorisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citation Analysis using Formal Concept Analysis: A case study in Software Engineering

Tilley

Eklund

2007

18th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2007)

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In this paper Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is used as a means to analyse a field of research using published academic papers as its input. In particular, results are presented based on a case study of 47 academic papers in a scientific field of study. The analysis includes inferences about the field of study based on the domain background knowledge derived from the ISO12207 software engineering standard. Additionally, a number of alternative classifications based on the target application language and the reported application size are introduced. FCA reveals useful insights about the nature of the subject matter: identifying fruitful areas of research as well as producing details about characteristics of the community under examination. Disciplines Physical Sciences and Mathematics Publication DetailsThis paper was originally published as Thomas, T, and Eklund, P, Citation Analysis using Formal Abstract In this paper Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is used as a means to analyse a field of research using published academic papers as its input. In particular, results are presented based on a case study of 47 academic papers in a scientific field of study. The analysis includes inferences about the field of study based on the domain background knowledge derived from the ISO12207 software engineering standard. Additionally, a number of alternative classifications based on the target application language and the reported application size are introduced. FCA reveals useful insights about the nature of the subject matter: identifying fruitful areas of research as well as producing details about characteristics of the community under examination.

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Debugging temporal specifications with concept analysis

Cited by 24 publications

References 0 publications

Inferno: Streamlining Verification With Inferred Semantics

Inferno: Streamlining Verification With Inferred Semantics

Mining Temporal Specifications for Error Detection

Citation Analysis using Formal Concept Analysis: A case study in Software Engineering

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