Precision reuse for efficient regression verification

Abstract

Continuous testing during development is a well-established technique for software-quality assurance. Continuous model checking from revision to revision is not yet established as a standard practice, because the enormous resource consumption makes its application impractical. Model checkers compute a large number of verification facts that are necessary for verifying if a given specification holds. We have identified a category of such intermediate results that are easy to store and efficient to reuse: abstraction precisions. The precision of an abstract domain specifies the level of abstraction that the analysis works on. Precisions are thus a precious result of the verification effort and it is a waste of resources to throw them away after each verification run. In particular, precisions are reasonably small and thus easy to store; they are easy to process and have a large impact on resource consumption. We experimentally show the impact of precision reuse on industrial verification problems created from 62 Linux kernel device drivers with 1 119 revisions.

Facilitating Reuse in Multi-goal Test-Suite Generation for Software Product Lines

“…Applying CPAchecker for product-line verification has been proposed [3], incorporating BDD analysis for reuse of verification results [2]. Reuse of reachability analysis results for different test goals [7,8] has been presented and implemented as CPA/tiger on top of CPAchecker and corresponding reuse concepts have been applied to intermediate verification results [10]. Both approaches are limited to single systems without variability.…”

Property differencing for incremental checking

“…Recent work has also focused on techniques which reuse verification results to help reduce the cost of program analysis [10,56,60] and reuse of reachability information through similarity checking of test goals represented as automata to reduce the cost of test input generation [9]. iProperty partitions the analysis of code and property specifications, leveraging the results of a change impact analysis and reusing the verification results from checking the previous version of the program against the property specifications to reduce the cost of property checking.…”

HiFrog: SMT-based Function Summarization for Software Verification

“…Due to the lack of space, here we provide recent related work close to our problem domain. The CPAchecker tool is able to migrate predicates across program versions [3]. Deductive verification tools such as Viper and Dafny offer modular verification [12] and cashing the intermediate verification results [10] respectively.…”