Inferring better contracts

Considerable progress has been made towards automatic support for one of the principal techniques available to enhance program reliability: equipping programs with extensive contracts. The results of current contract inference tools are still often unsatisfactory in practice, especially for programm...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2011 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) pp. 191 - 200
Main Authors: Wei, Yi, Furia, Carlo A., Kazmin, Nikolay, Meyer, Bertrand
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 21.05.2011
IEEE
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
contract inference
Contracts
Data mining
Data structures
Decision trees
General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Reliability
General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Validation
Hardware > Hardware validation > Functional verification > Assertion checking
Indexes
invariants
random testing
Software
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation
Software reliability
Theory of computation > Logic
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Assertions
data mining
contract inference
invariants
random testing
ISBN:9781450304450, 1450304451
ISSN:0270-5257
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Considerable progress has been made towards automatic support for one of the principal techniques available to enhance program reliability: equipping programs with extensive contracts. The results of current contract inference tools are still often unsatisfactory in practice, especially for programmers who already apply some kind of basic Design by Contract discipline, since the inferred contracts tend to be simple assertions - the very ones that programmers find easy to write. We present new, completely automatic inference techniques and a supporting tool, which take advantage of the presence of simple programmer-written contracts in the code to infer sophisticated assertions, involving for example implication and universal quantification. Applied to a production library of classes covering standard data structures such as linked lists, arrays, stacks, queues and hash tables, the tool is able, entirely automatically, to infer 75% of the complete contracts - contracts yielding the full formal specification of the classes - with very few redundant or irrelevant clauses.
ISBN:9781450304450
1450304451
ISSN:0270-5257
DOI:10.1145/1985793.1985820