相关论文: What Good Are Strong Specifications?

Testing has become an indispensable activity of software development, yet writing good and relevant tests remains a quite challenging task. One well-known problem is that it often is impossible or unrealistic to test for every outcome, as…

Contracts are a form of lightweight formal specification embedded in the program text. Being executable parts of the code, they encourage programmers to devote proper attention to specifications, and help maintain consistency between…

The quality of software produced by students is often poor. How to teach students to develop good quality software has long been a topic in computer science education and research. We must conclude that we still do not have a good answer to…

The goal of this paper is to help mainstream programmers routinely use formal verification on their smart contracts by 1) proposing a new YAML-format for writing general-purpose formal specifications, 2) demonstrating how a formal…

Formal verification entails testing software to ensure it operates as specified. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into lines of code. They run on blockchain platforms and…

Formal specifications have numerous benefits for both designers and users of network protocols. They provide clear, unambiguous representations, which are useful as documentation and for testing. They can help reveal disagreements about…

The problem of writing a specification which accurately reflects the intent of the developer has long been recognized as fundamental. We propose a method and a supporting tool to write and check a specification and an implementation using a…

Existing techniques of Design by Contract do not allow software developers to specify complete contracts in many cases. Incomplete contracts leave room for malicious implementations. This article complements Design by Contract with a simple…

Formal software specification is known to enable early error detection and explicit invariants, yet it has seen limited industrial adoption due to its high notation overhead and the expertise required to use traditional formal languages.…

Design by Constract (DBC) has influenced the development of formal specification languages that allow the mix of specification and implementation code, like Eiffel, the Java Modeling Language (JML) and Spec#. Meanwhile algebraic…

This paper introduces a new technique for dynamic verification of component-based real-time systems based on statistical inference. Verifying such systems requires checking two types of properties: functional and real-time. For functional…

Test or prove? These two approaches to software verification have long been presented as opposites. One is dynamic, the other static: a test executes the program, a proof only analyzes the program text. A different perspective is emerging,…

Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more…

Software contracts allow programmers to state rich program properties using the full expressive power of an object language. However, since they are enforced at runtime, monitoring contracts imposes significant overhead and delays error…

Reusable software components need expressive specifications. This paper outlines a rigorous foundation to model-based contracts, a method to equip classes with strong contracts that support accurate design, implementation, and formal…

In this paper I discuss how can lightweight formal methods be used to specify and verify software with complex configurations (for example, distributed protocols that work on specific network configurations). More specifically, I briefly…

Formal methods were frequently shown to be effective and, perhaps because of that, practitioners are interested in using them more often. Still, these methods are far less applied than expected, particularly, in critical domains where they…

While using formal methods offers advantages over unit testing, their steep learning curve can be daunting to developers and can be a major impediment to widespread adoption. To support integration into an industrial software engineering…

Many software developments projects fail due to quality problems. Software testing enables the creation of high quality software products. Since it is a cumbersome and expensive task, and often hard to manage, both its technical background…

Smart contracts are appealing because they are self-executing business agreements between parties with the predefined and immutable obligations and rights. However, as with all software, smart contracts may contain vulnerabilities because…