相关论文: What Good Are Strong Specifications?

Soft constraints extend classical constraints to represent multiple consistency levels, and thus provide a way to express preferences, fuzziness, and uncertainty. While there are many soft constraint solving formalisms, even distributed…

This paper analyses the security contribution of typical functional-language features by examining them in the light of accepted information security principles. Imperative and functional code are compared to illustrate various cases. In…

Web Services provide interoperable mechanisms for describing, locating and invoking services over the Internet; composition further enables to build complex services out of simpler ones for complex B2B applications. While current studies on…

Unit tests are widely used to check source code quality, but they can be too coarse-grained or ill-suited for testing individual program statements. We introduce inline tests to make it easier to check for faults in statements. We motivate…

Virtually all verification techniques using formal methods rely on the availability of a formal specification, which describes the design requirements precisely. However, formulating specifications remains a manual task that is notoriously…

Formal methods provide systematic and rigorous techniques for software development. We strongly believe that they must be taught in computer science curricula. In this paper we present the pedagogic rationale and the concrete implementation…

Many programmers, when they encounter an error, would like to have the benefit of automatic fix suggestions---as long as they are, most of the time, adequate. Initial research in this direction has generally limited itself to specific…

Does the act of writing a specification (how the code should behave) for a piece of security sensitive code lead to developers producing more secure code? We asked 138 developers to write a snippet of code to store a password: Half of them…

Automatic synthesis from a given specification automatically constructs correct implementation. This frees the user from the mundane implementation work, but still requires the specification. But is specifying easier than implementing? In…

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…

As a blockchain platform that has developed vigorously in recent years, Ethereum is different from Bitcoin in that it introduces smart contracts into blockchain.Solidity is one of the most mature and widely used smart contract programming…

Smart contracts are programs that execute inside blockchains such as Ethereum to manipulate digital assets. Since bugs in smart contracts may lead to substantial financial losses, there is considerable interest in formally proving their…

Rule-based policy and contract systems have rarely been studied in terms of their software engineering properties. This is a serious omission, because in rule-based policy or contract representation languages rules are being used as a…

The use of lightweight formal methods (LFM) for the development of industrial applications has become a major trend. Although the term "lightweight formal methods" has been used for over ten years now, there seems to be no common agreement…

The lack of specifications is a key difference between traditional software engineering and machine learning. We discuss how it drastically impacts how we think about divide-and-conquer approaches to system design, and how it impacts reuse,…

The purpose of this paper is to address some of the challenges of formally specifying components of shared-memory concurrent programs. The focus is to provide an abstract specification of a component that is suitable for use both by clients…

Formal methods for software correctness are critical to the future of software engineering - and so must be an essential part of software engineering education. Unfortunately, formal methods are often resisted by students due to perceived…

We propose a method to write and check a specification including quantifiers using behaviors, i.e., input-output pairs. Our method requires the following input from the user: (1) answers to a finite number of queries, each of which presents…

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…

Model-driven design of software for safety-critical applications often relies on mathematically grounded techniques such as the B method. Such techniques consist in the successive applications of refinements to derive a concrete…