An Automated Approach to Specification-Based Program Inspection

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

Chen

Nagoya

et al. 2012

Software inspection is a static analysis technique that is widely used for defect detection, but which suffers from a lack of rigor. In this paper, we address this problem by taking advantage of formal specification and analysis to support a systematic and rigorous inspection method. The aim of the method is to use inspection to determine whether every functional scenario defined in the specification is implemented correctly by a set of program paths and whether every program path of the program contributes to the implementation of some functional scenario in the specification. The method is comprised of five steps: deriving functional scenarios from the specification, deriving paths from the program, linking scenarios to paths, analyzing paths against the corresponding scenarios, and producing an inspection report, and allows for a systematic and automatic generation of a checklist for inspection. We present an example to show how the method can be used, and describe an experiment to evaluate its performance by comparing it to perspective-based reading (PBR). The result shows that our method may be more effective in detecting function-related defects than PBR but slightly less effective in detecting implementation-related defects. We also describe a prototype tool to demonstrate the supportability of the method, and draw some conclusions about our work.

Section: Inspection Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal Specification-Based Inspection for Verification of Programs

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

Chen

Nagoya

et al. 2012

“…The technique, known as Document Driven Inspection (DDI), was developed to help the inspection of structured programs. We have developed further along this line to establish a systematic approach to inspecting programs based on formal speci…cations [14].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If a speci…cation can be converted into an equivalent well-formed speci…cation, it is said to be complete in the sense of covering all possible functional scenarios. An algorithm for converting a pre-post style speci…cation into an equivalent FSF was developed by the …rst author in his previous publication [14].…”

Section: Desired Functional Behaviorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integration of formal specification, review, and testing for software component quality assurance

Proceedings of the 2009 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

Tamai

Nakajima

2009

Self Cite

The reliability of software components is the most important quality required for software systems constructed using component-based development paradigm. This paper describes an approach to integrating formal speci…cation, review, and testing for software component quality assurance. In this approach, requirements errors can be removed and missing requirements can be identi…ed by formalizing requirements into a formal speci…cation, and the resulting speci…cation can then be used as a …rm foundation for a rigorous review and testing of the program that is intended to provide a correct implementation. We discuss how formalization, review, and testing work together at di¤erent levels of software development for improving software quality through detecting and removing errors in documentation.

“…A single operation in the specification may be implemented as a method in a class or as several methods across different classes in the program. All these possibilities are likely in practice according to our experiences in developing software systems using formal specification techniques [7][8] and in conducting case studies of reviewing programs based on their specifications [9] [10]. They set up barriers to the effective application of specification-based verification techniques to real-world systems, because establishing links from data items and operations in specifications to the corresponding ones in programs may be difficult and timeconsuming.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Review Approach to Detecting Violations of Consistency Between Specification and Program Structures

Chen

Int. J. Soft. Eng. Knowl. Eng.

Wong

2008

Self Cite

The application of specification-based program verification techniques (e.g., black-box testing, formal proof) faces strong challenges in practice when the gap between the structure of a specification and that of its program is large. This paper describes a viewbased program review approach to addressing these challenges. The essential idea of the approach is first to derive comparable views from the specification and program, and then detect and eliminate the violations of structural consistency in the program views on the basis of a set of criteria. We also developed a prototype tool to support the review approach, and conducted a case study to assess the effectiveness of the approach.