Usable Verification of Object-Oriented Programs by Combining Static and Dynamic Techniques

Abstract

Abstract. With formal techniques becoming more and more powerful, the next big challenge is making software verification practical and usable. The Eve verification environment contributes to this goal by seamlessly integrating a static prover and an automatic testing tool into a development environment. The paper discusses the general principles behind the integration of heterogeneous verification tools; the peculiar challenges involved in combining static proofs and dynamic testing techniques; and how the combination, implemented in Eve through a blackboard architecture, can improve the user experience with little overhead over usual development practices. Eve is freely available for download.

Program Checking with Less Hassle

“…AutoProof is integrated in EVE [33], the research branch of the EiffelStudio development environment, and is freely available online:…”

“…CEGAR modelchecking [3], for example, uses model-checking exhaustive verification techniques on approximate program models, combined with a form of symbolic execution to determine whether the failed verification attempts are indicative of real implementation errors or only a figment of an imprecise abstraction. Tools such as DSD-Crasher [12] and our EVE [33] integrate testing and static checking to find when the errors reported by the latter are spurious. Collaborative verification [9] is also based on the combination of testing and static verification, and on the explicit formalization of the restrictions of each tool used in the combination.…”

To Run What No One Has Run Before: Executing an Intermediate Verification Language

“…Another line of research in testing is the combination with static techniques, with the goal of complementing each other's strengths to search the input state space more efficiently. In [25], we combined testing with program proving at a high level. A different array of techniques combines testing with symbolic execution; see the recent survey [2].…”

Javanni: A Verifier for JavaScript

“…Program 1 is a collection of small JavaScript applets from http: //www.jsworkshop.com; program 2 is one single larger application, a poker game, from the same source. Programs 3-6 are JavaScript implementations of object-oriented standard examples also used in previous work of ours [7,6], each equipped with functional specifications (pre-and postcondition) for each method. In this case, verification also required intermediate assertions, but these were much fewer than in [7,6] …”