User interface development and software environments: the Chiron-1 system

Keller, Rudolf K.; Cameron, Mary; Taylor, Richard N.; Troup, Dennis B.

doi:10.1109/icse.1991.130645

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…To evaluate the usefulness of this automated assume-guarantee reasoning technique, we tried to verify properties that were known to hold on a small set of scalable systems: the Chiron user interface system [Keller et al 1991] (both the single and the multiple dispatcher versions as described in Avrunin et al [1999]), the Gas Station problem [Helmbold and Luckham 1985], Peterson's mutual exclusion protocol [Peterson 1981], the Relay problem [Siegel and Avrunin 2002], and the Smokers problem [Patil 1971]. These systems were specified in Ada and use rendezvous for intertask communication.…”

Section: Methodology and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaking up is hard to do

Cobleigh

Avrunin

Clarke

2008

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Finite-state verification techniques are often hampered by the state-explosion problem. One proposed approach for addressing this problem is assume-guarantee reasoning, where a system under analysis is partitioned into subsystems and these subsystems are analyzed individually. By composing the results of these analyses, it can be determined whether or not the system satisfies a property. Because each subsystem is smaller than the whole system, analyzing each subsystem individually may reduce the overall cost of verification. Often the behavior of a subsystem is dependent on the subsystems with which it interacts, and thus it is usually necessary to provide assumptions about the environment in which a subsystem executes. Because developing assumptions has been a difficult manual task, the evaluation of assume-guarantee reasoning has been limited. Using recent advances for automatically generating assumptions, we undertook a study to determine if assume-guarantee reasoning provides an advantage over monolithic verification. In this study, we considered all two-way decompositions for a set of systems and properties, using two different verifiers, FLAVERS and LTSA. By increasing the number of repeated tasks in these systems, we evaluated the decompositions as they were scaled. We found that in only a few cases can assume-guarantee reasoning verify properties on larger systems than monolithic verification can, and in these cases the systems that can be analyzed are only a few sizes larger. Although these results are discouraging, they provide insight about research directions that should be pursued and highlight the importance of experimental evaluation in this area.

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Section: Methodology and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaking up is hard to do

Cobleigh

Avrunin

Clarke

2008

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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“…In addition, for each of these programs, correctness properties are easily identified. The fourth example, the Chiron program, is derived from a real system [Keller et al 1991] and has been used as an example for comparing finite-state verification approaches ]. For the Chiron program, we developed several of our own properties by reverse engineering the program.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Chiron is a user-interface framework developed at the University of California at Irvine [Keller et al 1991]. Since it was not developed as an analysis test case, it may be more representative of "typical" concurrent Ada programs than some of the other programs we considered.…”

Section: The Chiron Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flow analysis for verifying properties of concurrent software systems

Dwyer

Clarke

Cobleigh

et al. 2004

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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This article describes FLAVERS, a finite-state verification approach that analyzes whether concurrent systems satisfy user-defined, behavioral properties. FLAVERS automatically creates a compact, event-based model of the system that supports efficient dataflow analysis. FLAVERS achieves this efficiency at the cost of precision. Analysts, however, can improve the precision of analysis results by selectively and judiciously incorporating additional semantic information into an analysis.We report on an empirical study of the performance of the FLAVERS/Ada toolset applied to a collection of multitasking Ada systems. This study indicates that sufficient precision for proving system properties can usually be achieved and that the cost for such analysis typically grows as a low-order polynomial in the size of the system.

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“…Chiron user interface system [10] is a moderate-size concurrent Ada program. It was built to address concerns of cost, maintainability, and sensitivity to changes in the development and mainte- Whenever there is an operation call on the ADT, the dispatcher intercepts the call and notifies each of the artists associated with that ADT with the event.…”

Section: Chiron User Interface Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards scalable compositional analysis by refactoring design models

Cheng

Young

Huang

et al. 2003

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

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Automated finite-state verification techniques have matured considerably in the past several years, but state-space explosion remains an obstacle to their use. Theoretical lower bounds on complexity imply that all of the techniques that have been developed to avoid or mitigate state-space explosion depend on models that are "well-formed" in some way, and will usually fail for other models. This further implies that, when analysis is applied to models derived from designs or implementations of actual software systems, a model of the system "as built" is unlikely to be suitable for automated analysis. In particular, compositional, hierarchical analysis (where state-space explosion is avoided by simplifying models of subsystems at several levels of abstraction) depend on the modular structure of the model to be analyzed. We describe how as-built finite-state models can be refactored for compositional state-space analysis, applying a series of transformations to produce an equivalent model whose structure exhibits suitable modularity. The process is supported by a parser which can parse a subset of Promela syntax and transform Promela code into refactored state graphs.

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User interface development and software environments: the Chiron-1 system

Cited by 10 publications

References 26 publications

Breaking up is hard to do

Breaking up is hard to do

Flow analysis for verifying properties of concurrent software systems

Towards scalable compositional analysis by refactoring design models

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