Software development and maintenance are costly endeavors. The cost can be reduced if more software defects are detected earlier in the development cycle. This paper introduces the Extended Static Checker for Java (ESC/Java), an experimental compile-time program checker that finds common programming errors. The checker is powered by verification-condition generation and automatic theoremproving techniques. It provides programmers with a simple annotation language with which programmer design decisions can be expressed formally. ESC/Java examines the annotated software and warns of inconsistencies between the design decisions recorded in the annotations and the actual code, and also warns of potential runtime errors in the code. This paper gives an overview of the checker architecture and annotation language and describes our experience applying the checker to tens of thousands of lines of Java programs.

Spec# is the latest in a long line of work on programming languages and systems aimed at improving the development of correct software. This paper describes the goals and architecture of the Spec# programming system, consisting of the object-oriented Spec# programming language, the Spec# compiler, and the Boogie static program verifier. The language includes constructs for writing specifications that capture programmer intentions about how methods and data are to be used, the compiler emits run-time checks to enforce these specifications, and the verifier can check the consistency between a program and its specifications. The Spec#

The Java Modeling Language (JML) can be used to specify the detailed design of Java classes and interfaces by adding annotations to Java source files. The aim of JML is to provide a specification language that is easy to use for Java programmers and that is supported by a wide range of tools for specification type-checking, runtime debugging, static analysis, and verification. This paper

This paper presents Korat, a novel framework for automated testing of Java programs. Given a formal specification for a method, Korat uses the method precondition to automatically generate all nonisomorphic test cases bounded by a given size. Korat then executes the method on each of these test cases, and uses the method postcondition as a test oracle to check the correctness of each output. To generate test cases for a method, Korat constructs a Java predicate (i.e., a method that returns a boolean) from the method’s precondition. The heart of Korat is a technique for automatic test case generation: given a predicate and a bound on the size of its inputs, Korat generates all nonisomorphic inputs for which the predicate returns true. Korat exhaustively explores the input space of the predicate but does so efficiently by monitoring the predicate’s executions and pruning large portions of the search space. This paper illustrates the use of Korat for testing several data structures, including some from the Java Collections Framework. The experimental results show that it is feasible to generate test cases from Java predicates, even when the search space for inputs is very large. This paper also compares Korat with a testing framework based on declarative specifications. Contrary to our initial expectation, the experiments show that Korat generates test cases much faster than the declarative framework.

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Abstract. Object-oriented unit tests consist of sequences of method invocations. Behavior of an invocation depends on the method’s arguments and the state of the receiver at the beginning of the invocation. Correspondingly, generating unit tests involves two tasks: generating method sequences that build relevant receiverobject states and generating relevant method arguments. This paper proposes Symstra, a framework that achieves both test generation tasks using symbolic execution of method sequences with symbolic arguments. The paper defines symbolic states of object-oriented programs and novel comparisons of states. Given a set of methods from the class under test and a bound on the length of sequences, Symstra systematically explores the object-state space of the class and prunes this exploration based on the state comparisons. Experimental results show that Symstra generates unit tests that achieve higher branch coverage faster than the existing test-generation techniques based on concrete method arguments. 1

Object invariants describe the consistency of object-oriented data structures and are central to reasoning about the correctness of object-oriented software. Yet, reasoning about object invariants in the presence of object references, methods, and subclassing is difficult. This paper describes a methodology for specifying and verifying object-oriented programs, using object invariants to specify the consistency of data and using ownership to organize objects into contexts. The novelty is that contexts can be dynamic: there is no bound on the number of objects in a context and objects can be transferred between contexts. The invariant of an object is allowed to depend on the fields of the object, on the fields of all objects in transitively-owned contexts, and on fields of objects reachable via given sequences of fields. With these invariants, one can describe a large variety of properties, including properties of cyclic data structures. Object invariants can be declared in or near the classes whose fields they depend on, not necessarily in the class of an owning object. The methodology is designed to allow modular reasoning, even in the presence of subclasses, and is proved sound.

Information flow policies are confidentiality policies that control information leakage through program execution. A common means to enforce secure information flow is through information flow type systems. Although type systems are compositional and usually enjoy decidable type checking or inference, their extensibility is very poor: type systems need to be redefined and proven sound for each new single variation of security policy and programming language for which secure information flow verification is desired. In contrast, program logics offer a general mechanism to enforce a variety of safety policies, and for this reason are favored in Proof Carrying Code, a promising security architecture for mobile code. However, the encoding of information flow policies in program logics is not straightforward, because they refer to a relation between two program executions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate logical formulations of secure information flow based on the idea of self-composition, that reduces the problem of secure information flow of a program P to a safety property for a program ˆP derived from P, by composing P with a renaming of itself. Self-composition enables the use of standard techniques for information flow policies verification, such as program logics and model checking, suitable in Proof Carrying Code infrastructures. We illustrate the applicability of self-composition in several settings, including different security policies such as non-interference and controlled forms of declassification, and programming languages such as an imperative language with parallel composition, a non-deterministic language, and finally a language with shared mutable data structures.

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Design by Contract, proposed by Meyer for the programming language Eiffel, is a technique that allows run-time checks of specification violation and their treatment during program execution. Jass, Java with assertions, is a Design by Contract extension for Java allowing to annotate Java programs with specifications in the form of assertions. The Jass tool is a pre-compiler that translates annotated into pure Java programs in which compliance with the specification is dynamically tested. Besides the