Abstract
When program verification fails, it is often hard to understand what went wrong in the absence of concrete executions that expose parts of the implementation or specification responsible for the failure. Automatic generation of such tests would require “executing” the complex specifications typically used for verification (with unbounded quantification and other expressive constructs), something beyond the capabilities of standard testing tools.
This paper presents a technique to automatically generate executions of programs annotated with complex specifications, and its implementation for the Boogie intermediate verification language. Our approach combines symbolic execution and SMT constraint solving to generate small tests that are easy to read and understand. The evaluation on several program verification examples demonstrates that our test case generation technique can help understand failed verification attempts in conditions where traditional testing is not applicable, thus making formal verification techniques easier to use in practice.
Work partially supported by SNF grants 200021-137931 (FullContracts), 200020-134974 (LSAT), and 200021-134976 (ASII); and by ERC grant 291389 (CME).
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Polikarpova, N., Furia, C.A., West, S. (2013). To Run What No One Has Run Before: Executing an Intermediate Verification Language. In: Legay, A., Bensalem, S. (eds) Runtime Verification. RV 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8174. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40787-1_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40787-1_15
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