Abstract

In order to model check a software component which is not a standalone program, we need a model of the software which completes the program. This problem is important for software engineers who need to deploy an existing component into a new environment. The model is typically generated by abstracting the surrounding software environment in which the component will be executed. However, abstracting the surrounding software is a difficult and error-prone task, particularly when the surrounding software is a complex software artifact which can not be easily abstracted. In this dissertation, we present a new approach to the problem by abstracting the software component under test and leaving the surrounding software concrete. We derive this abstract-concrete mixed model automatically for both sequential and concurrent C programs and verify them using the SPIN model checker. We give verification results for several components under test contained within complex software environments to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of our approach. We are able to find errors in components which were too complex for analysis by existing model checking techniques. We prove that this mixed abstract-concrete model can be bisimilar to the original complete software system using an abstraction refinement scheme. We then show how to generate test cases for the component under test using this abstraction refinement process.

Degree

PhD

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/