Aligning Qualitative, Real-Time, and Probabilistic Property Specification Patterns Using a Structured English Grammar

Abstract

Formal methods offer an effective means to assert the correctness of software systems through mathematical reasoning. However, the need to formulate system properties in a purely mathematical fashion can create pragmatic barriers to the application of these techniques. For this reason, Dwyer et al. invented property specification patterns which is a system of recurring solutions to deal with the temporal intricacies that would make the construction of reactive systems very hard otherwise. Today, property specification patterns provide general rules that help practitioners to qualify order and occurrence, to quantify time bounds, and to express probabilities of events. Nevertheless, a comprehensive framework combining qualitative, real-time, and probabilistic property specification patterns has remained elusive. The benefits of such a framework are twofold. First, it would remove the distinction between qualitative and quantitative aspects of events; and second, it would provide a structure to systematically discover new property specification patterns. In this paper, we report on such a framework and present a unified catalogue that combines all known plus 40 newly identified or extended patterns. We also offer a natural language front-end to map patterns to a temporal logic of choice. To demonstrate the virtue of this new framework, we applied it to a variety of industrial requirements, and use PSPWizard, a tool specifically developed to work with our unified pattern catalogue, to automatically render concrete instances of property specification patterns to formulae of an underlying temporal logic of choice.

AC-Contract: Run-Time Verification of Context-Aware Applications

“…They have been also extended to express probabilistic quality requirements (e.g., reliability, availability, and performance requirements) and the resulting catalogue is known as probabilistic specification patterns [18]. Finally, the work in [3] presents a unified catalogue that collects the existing specification patterns and combines them together with 40 newly identified or extended patterns. The result is a single, yet comprehensive and coherent, property specification pattern catalogue.…”

“…The high-level requirements are expressed in terms of the specification patterns proposed in [15] and according to the Structured English Grammar proposed in [3]. As explained before, this structured English grammar is a natural language front-end of property specification patterns.…”

“…As explained before, this structured English grammar is a natural language front-end of property specification patterns. Specifically, the framework presented in [3] presents a unified catalogue of the known specification patterns catalogues (i.e., the patterns in [15] and its real-time [22] and probabilistic [18] extensions) and of 40 newly identified patterns. The user might also exploit the PSPWizard [3] for selecting and instantiating specification patterns.…”

“…Properties are described in terms of property specification patterns [15], [3] that describe solutions to commonly recurrent requirements. The methodology we propose in this paper, called AC-contract, starting from highlevel requirements identifies properties that should hold locally on single parts of the system.…”

“…Summarizing, the contribution of the paper is twofold: (i) a general approach called AC-contract for the run-time verification of context-aware applications, and (ii) the instantiation of the approach for the verification of a set of patterns [3] on a Java reflection system for Android.…”