Article

Mining temporal specifications for error detection

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TACAS'05: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

Pages 461 - 476

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-31980-1_30

Published: 04 April 2005 Publication History

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Abstract

Specifications are necessary in order to find software bugs using program verification tools. This paper presents a novel automatic specification mining algorithm that uses information about error handling to learn temporal safety rules. Our algorithm is based on the observation that programs often make mistakes along exceptional control-flow paths, even when they behave correctly on normal execution paths. We show that this focus improves the effectiveness of the miner for discovering specifications beneficial for bug finding.

We present quantitative results comparing our technique to four existing miners. We highlight assumptions made by various miners that are not always born out in practice. Additionally, we apply our algorithm to existing Java programs and analyze its ability to learn specifications that find bugs in those programs. In our experiments, we find filtering candidate specifications to be more important than ranking them. We find 430 bugs in 1 million lines of code. Notably, we find 250 more bugs using per-program specifications learned by our algorithm than with generic specifications that apply to all programs.

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Cited By

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Nielebock SBlockhaus PKruger JOrtmeier FHuyen PTan SMechtaev SKhurshid S(2024)ASAP-Repair: API-Specific Automated Program Repair Based on API Usage GraphsProceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Automated Program Repair10.1145/3643788.3648011(1-4)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643788.3648011
OBrien DDyer RNguyen TRajan HRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Data-Driven Evidence-Based Syntactic Sugar DesignProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639580(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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Huang JNie JGong YYou WLiang BBian PRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Raisin: Identifying Rare Sensitive Functions for Bug DetectionProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639165(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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Index Terms

Mining temporal specifications for error detection
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

TACAS'05: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

April 2005

585 pages

ISBN:3540253335

Editors:
Nicolas Halbwachs
CNRS - VERIMAG, 2, av. de Vignate, Gières, France
,
Lenore D. Zuck
University of Illinois at Chicago, 2, av. de Vignate, Gières

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

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Published: 04 April 2005

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Nielebock SBlockhaus PKruger JOrtmeier FHuyen PTan SMechtaev SKhurshid S(2024)ASAP-Repair: API-Specific Automated Program Repair Based on API Usage GraphsProceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Automated Program Repair10.1145/3643788.3648011(1-4)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643788.3648011
OBrien DDyer RNguyen TRajan HRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Data-Driven Evidence-Based Syntactic Sugar DesignProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639580(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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Huang JNie JGong YYou WLiang BBian PRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Raisin: Identifying Rare Sensitive Functions for Bug DetectionProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639165(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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Mining specifications

Mining API Error-Handling Specifications from Source Code

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