Formal Specification-Based Inspection for Verification of Programs

Abstract

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.

Requirements‐related fault prevention during the transformation from formal specifications to programs

“…An accurate and comprehensive understanding of the faults will improve the process and quality of programming and thus assist in avoiding introducing these faults into the final code. After the programme is produced, there are several suitable activities to identify software faults, such as formal specification-based programme inspection [32,33], specification-based testing [34], formal verification [35,36], and software model checking [37]. We identified the faults by examining a set of programs written by a group of postgraduate students who had taken the course "Formal Engineering Methods for Software Development Using SOFL Method" taught by this paper's corresponding author.…”

“…An accurate and comprehensive understanding of the faults will improve the process and quality of programming and thus assist in avoiding introducing these faults into the final code. After the programme is produced, there are several suitable activities to identify software faults, such as formal specification‐based programme inspection [32, 33], specification‐based testing [34], formal verification [35, 36], and software model checking [37].…”

“…They were asked to implement the formal specifications of some critical systems, such as a hotel reservation system. The corresponding author also taught the students' appropriate review [32] and testing [34] techniques for detecting and reporting faults. We collected the programs and the corresponding fault reports and completed a study.…”

Fagan Inspection: A Defects Finding Mechanism in Software Requirements Specification (SRS) Document

“…But slightly less effective in detecting some defects at implementation level. They also used a Prototyping tool to support their inspection method [27]. Liu et al aimed to detect the impact of defects on quality.…”

“…Liu et al aimed to detect the impact of defects on quality. They both did a real time inspection for discrete surface defects [27]. Shahid and Sulaiman described that quality can be enhanced by using software metrics [28].…”