Related papers: A Programmer-Centric Approach to Program Verificat…

Test instability in a floating-point program occurs when the control flow of the program diverges from its ideal execution assuming real arithmetic. This phenomenon is caused by the presence of round-off errors that affect the evaluation of…

Mandating public availability of computer code underlying computational simulation modeling research ends up doing a disservice to the cause of model verification when inconsistencies between the specifications in the publication text and…

Nowadays, smart contracts have become increasingly popular and, as with software development in general, testing is the standard method for verifying their correctness. However, smart contracts require a higher level of certainty regarding…

Verification is the process of checking whether a product has been implemented according to its prescribed specifications. We study the case of a designer (the developer) that needs to verify its design by a third party (the verifier), by…

Critical flaws continue to exist at the level of domain, requirement, and/or design specification, and specification verification (i.e., to check whether a specification has desirable properties) is still one of the most important…

A computational system is called autonomous if it is able to make its own decisions, or take its own actions, without human supervision or control. The capability and spread of such systems have reached the point where they are beginning to…

Formal methods apply algorithms based on mathematical principles to enhance the reliability of systems. It would only be natural to try to progress from verification, model checking or testing a system against its formal specification into…

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a truly-declarative programming paradigm proposed in the area of non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming, that has been recently employed in many applications. The development of efficient ASP systems…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer promising potential for automating formal methods. However, applying them to formal verification remains challenging due to the complexity of specification languages, the risk of…

Testing is one of the most indispensable tasks in software engineering. The role of testing in software development has grown significantly because testing is able to reveal defects in the code in an early stage of development. Many unit…

Validation is a central activity when developing formal specifications. Similarly to coding, a possible validation technique is to define upfront test cases or scenarios that a future specification should satisfy or not. Unfortunately,…

Deriving formal specifications from informal requirements is difficult since one has to take into account the disparate conceptual worlds of the application domain and of software development. To bridge the conceptual gap we propose…

Many scientific-software projects test their codes inadequately, or not at all. Despite its well-known benefits, adopting routine testing is often not easy. Development teams may have doubts about establishing effective test procedures,…

With the progress in deductive program verification research, new tools and techniques have become available to support design-by-contract reasoning about non-trivial programs written in widely-used programming languages. However, deductive…

Term rewriting systems have a simple syntax and semantics and facilitate proofs of correctness. However, they are not as popular in industry or academia as imperative languages. We define a term rewriting based abstract programming language…

An issue limiting the adoption of model checking technologies by the industry is the ability, for non-experts, to express their requirements using the property languages supported by verification tools. This has motivated the definition of…

The structures for the expression of fault-tolerance provisions into the application software are the central topic of this paper. Structuring techniques answer the questions "How to incorporate fault-tolerance in the application layer of a…

Code pre-trained models (CodePTMs) have recently demonstrated significant success in code intelligence. To interpret these models, some probing methods have been applied. However, these methods fail to consider the inherent characteristics…

In the language-theoretic approach to refinement verification, we check that the language of traces of an implementation all belong to the language of a specification. We consider the refinement verification problem for asynchronous…

This paper describes the formal verification of two Turing machines using the program verifier Dafny. Both machines are deciders, so we prove total correctness. They are typical first examples of Turing machines used in any course of…