Related papers: Program Repair by Stepwise Correctness Enhancement

Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both…

Algorithmic and data refinement are well studied topics that provide a mathematically rigorous approach to gradually introducing details in the implementation of software. Program refinements are performed in the context of some programming…

Formal specification techniques allow expressing idealized specifications, which abstract from restrictions that may arise in implementations. However, partial implementations are universal in software development due to practical…

Incorrectness Separation Logic (ISL) is a proof system designed to automate verification and detect bugs in programs manipulating heap memories. In this study, we extend ISL to support variable-length array predicates and pointer…

Refactoring is modifying a program without changing its external behavior. In this paper, we make the concept of external behavior precise for a simple answer set programming language. Then we describe a proof assistant for the task of…

Properties such as provable security and correctness for randomized programs are naturally expressed relationally as approximate equivalences. As a result, a number of relational program logics have been developed to reason about such…

Can one estimate the number of remaining faults in a software system? A credible estimation technique would be immensely useful to project managers as well as customers. It would also be of theoretical interest, as a general law of software…

Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…

Software reliability is an important quality attrib-ute, often evaluated as either a function of time or of system structures. The goal of this study is to have this metric cover both for component-based software, be-cause its reliability…

We prove an elementary yet useful inequality bounding the maximal value of certain linear programs. This leads directly to a bound on the martingale difference for arbitrarily dependent random variables, providing a generalization of some…

Software quality is one of the essential aspects of a software. With increasing demand, software designs are becoming more complex, increasing the probability of software defects. Testers improve the quality of software by fixing defects.…

Program synthesis is a class of regression problems where one seeks a solution, in the form of a source-code program, mapping the inputs to their corresponding outputs exactly. Due to its precise and combinatorial nature, program synthesis…

The usual advantages put forward for including nullability declarations in the type systems of programming languages are that they improve program reliability or performance. But there is another, entirely different, reason for doing so. In…

We extend Robust Optimization to fractional programming, where both the objective and the constraints contain uncertain parameters. Earlier work did not consider uncertainty in both the objective and the constraints, or did not use Robust…

Research software refers to software development tools that accelerate discovery and simplifies access to digital infrastructures. However, although research software platforms can be built increasingly more innovative and powerful than…

Relative worst order analysis is a supplement or alternative to competitive analysis which has been shown to give results more in accordance with observed behavior of online algorithms for a range of different online problems. The…

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…

Problems in program analysis can be solved by developing novel program semantics and deriving abstractions conventionally. For over thirty years, higher-order program analysis has been sold as a hard problem. Its solutions have required…

Test-based automatic program repair has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. However, the test suites in practice are often too weak to guarantee correctness and existing approaches often generate a large number of incorrect…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…