Work

Quickly detecting relevant program invariants

Year: 2000

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Explicitly stated program invariants can help programmers by characterizing certain aspects of program execution and identifying program properties that must be preserved when modifying code. Unfortunately, these invariants are usually absent from code. Previous work showed how to dynamically detect invariants from program traces by looking for patterns in and relationships among variable values. A prototype implementation, Daikon, accurately recovered invariants from formally-specified programs, and the invariants it detected in other programs assisted programmers in a software evolution task. However, Daikon suffered from reporting too many invariants, many of which were not useful, and also failed to report some desired invariants.

Source: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion)

DOI: 10.1145/337180.337240

Authors: Michael D. Enst, Adam Czeisler, William G. Griswold, David Notkin

Institutions: University of Washington, University of California San Diego

Language: English

Topic: Software Testing and Debugging Techniques

Subfield: Software

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: National Science Foundation, Microsoft, University of Washington, University of California, San Diego

Award: Coping With Software Change Using Information Transparency