loading...
 This Article 
   
 Share 
   
 Bibliographic References 
   
 Add to: 
 
Digg
Furl
Spurl
Blink
Simpy
Google
Del.icio.us
Y!MyWeb
 
 Search 
   
21st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'99)
Dynamically discovering likely program invariants to support program evolution
Los Angeles, California
May 16-May 22
ISBN: 1-58113-074-0
Michael D. Ernst, University of Washington, Seattle
Jake CockrelI, University of Washington, Seattle
William G. Griswold, University of California, San Diego
David Notkin, University of Washington, Seattle
Explicitly stated program invariants can help programmers by identifying program properties that must be preserved when modifying code. In practice, however, these invariants are usually implicit. An alternative to expecting programmers to fully annotate code with invariants is to automatically infer invariants from the program itself. This research focuses on dynamic techniques for discovering invariants from execution traces. This paper reports two results. First, it describes techniques for dynamically discovering invariants, along with an instrumenter and an inference engine that embody these techniques. Second, it reports on the application of the engine to two sets of target programs. In programs from Cries's work on program derivation, we rediscovered predefined invariants. In a C program lacking explicit invariants, we discovered invariants that assisted a software evolution task.
Citation:
Michael D. Ernst, Jake CockrelI, William G. Griswold, David Notkin, "Dynamically discovering likely program invariants to support program evolution," icse, pp.213, 21st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'99), 1999
Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use.