More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Expressing and checking intended changes via software change contracts

Authors:

Abhik RoychoudhuryAuthors Info & Claims

ISSTA 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Pages 1 - 11

https://doi.org/10.1145/2483760.2483772

Published: 15 July 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Software errors often originate from incorrect changes, including incorrect program fixes, incorrect feature updates and so on. Capturing the intended program behavior explicitly via contracts is thus an attractive proposition. In our recent work, we had espoused the notion of "change contracts" to express the intended program behavior changes across program versions. Change contracts differ from program contracts in that they do not require the programmer to describe the intended behavior of program features which are unchanged across program versions. In this work, we present the formal semantics of our change contract language built on top of the Java Modeling Language (JML). Our change contract language can describe behavioral as well as structural changes. We evaluate the expressivity of the change contract language via a survey given to final year undergraduate students. The survey results enable us to understand the usability of our change contract language for purposes of writing contracts, comprehending written contracts, and modifying programs according to given change contracts. Finally, we discuss the tool support developed for our change contract language. The tool support enables (i) test generation to witness contract violation, as well as (ii) automated repair of certain tests which are broken due to program changes.

References

[1]

Apache Ant. http://ant.apache.org/.

[2]

M. Barnett, B. E. Chang, R. DeLine, B. Jacobs, and K. R. M. Leino. Boogie: A modular reusable verifier for object-oriented programs. In Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Formal Methods for Components and Objects, pages 364–387, 2006.

Digital Library

[3]

M. Barnett, K. R. M. Leino, and W. Schulte. The Spec# programming system: An overview. In Proceedings of the 2004 Workshop on Construction and Analysis of Safe, Secure, and Interoperable Smart Devices, pages 49–69, 2004.

Digital Library

[4]

L. Burdy, Y. Cheon, D. R. Cok, M. D. Ernst, J. R. Kiniry, G. T. Leavens, K. R. M. Leino, and E. Poll. An overview of JML tools and applications. STTT, 7(3):212–232, 2005.

Digital Library

[5]

Y. Chen, D. Rosenblum, and K. Vo. Testtube: A system for selective regression testing. In ICSE, pages 211–220, 1994.

Digital Library

[6]

Y. Cheon and G. T. Leavens. A runtime assertion checker for the Java Modeling Language (JML). In Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Software Engineering Research and Practice, pages 322–328, 2002.

[7]

D. R. Cok and J. Kiniry. ESC/Java2: Uniting ESC/Java and JML. In Proceedings of the 2004 International Workshop on Construction and Analysis of Safe, Secure, and Interoperable Smart Devices, pages 108–128, 2004.

Digital Library

[8]

C. Flanagan, K. Leino, M. Lillibridge, G. Nelson, J. Saxe, and R. Stata. Extended static checking for Java. In PLDI, pages 234–245, 2002.

Digital Library

[9]

R. Gupta, M. Harrold, and M. Soffa. An approach to regression testing using slicing. In Proceedings of the 1992 Conference on Software Maintenance, pages 299–308, 1992.

[10]

D. Jackson and D. Ladd. Semantic diff: A tool for summarizing the effects of modifications. In Proceedings of the ’94 International Conference on Software Maintenance, pages 243–252, 1994.

Digital Library

[11]

Eclipse JDT. http://www.eclipse.org/jdt/.

[12]

W. Jin, A. Orso, and T. Xie. Automated behavioral regression testing. In Proceedings of 2010 International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, pages 137–146, 2010.

Digital Library

[13]

S. K. Lahiri, C. Hawblitzel, M. Kawaguchi, and H. Rebêlo. SymDiff: A language-agnostic semantic diff tool for imperative programs. In CAV, pages 712–717, 2012.

Digital Library

[14]

B. Meyer. Eiffel: The language and environment. Prentice hall press, 300, 1991.

Digital Library

[15]

B. Meyer. Applying “Design by Contract”. IEEE Computer, 25:40–51, 1992.

Digital Library

[16]

OpenJML. http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ jmlspecs/wiki/OpenJml.

[17]

C. Pacheco and M. D. Ernst. Randoop: feedback-directed random testing for Java. In OOPSLA, pages 815–816, 2007.

Digital Library

[18]

D. Parnas. Precise documentation: The key to better software. In The Future of Software Engineering, pages 125–148. Springer, 2011.

[19]

S. Person, M. Dwyer, S. Elbaum, and C. Pasareanu. Differential symbolic execution. In FSE, pages 226–237, 2008.

Digital Library

[20]

D. Qi, A. Roychoudhury, Z. Liang, and K. Vaswani. DARWIN: An approach for debugging evolving programs. In ESEC-FSE, pages 33–42, 2009.

Digital Library

[21]

D. Qi, J. Yi, and A. Roychoudhury. Software change contracts. In FSE, pages 22:1–22:4, 2012.

Digital Library

[22]

G. Rothermel, R. Untch, C. Chu, and M. Harrold. Prioritizing test cases for regression testing. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 27(10):929–948, 2001.

Digital Library

[23]

XMLUnit. http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/.

[24]

XStream. http://xstream.codehaus.org/.

[25]

A. Zeller. Yesterday, my program worked. Today, it does not. Why? In ESEC/FSE, pages 253–267, 1999.

Digital Library

Cited By

Ismayilzada ERahman MKim DYi J(2023)Poracle: Testing Patches under Preservation Conditions to Combat the Overfitting Problem of Program RepairACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/362529333:2(1-39)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3625293
Venturini DCogo FPolato IGerosa MWiese I(2023)I Depended on You and You Broke Me: An Empirical Study of Manifesting Breaking Changes in Client PackagesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357603732:4(1-26)Online publication date: 26-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576037
Foo DChua HYeo JAng MSharma ALeavens GGarcia APăsăreanu C(2018)Efficient static checking of library updatesProceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3236024.3275535(791-796)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236024.3275535
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Expressing and checking intended changes via software change contracts

Recommendations

Software Change Contracts

Software errors often originate from incorrect changes, including incorrect program fixes, incorrect feature updates, and so on. Capturing the intended program behavior explicitly via contracts is thus an attractive proposition. In our recent work, we ...
Behavioral software contracts
Software change contracts
FSE '12: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Incorrect program changes including regression bugs, incorrect bug-fixes, incorrect feature updates are pervasive in software. These incorrect program changes affect software quality and are difficult to detect/correct. In this paper, we propose the ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISSTA 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 2013

381 pages

ISBN:9781450321594

DOI:10.1145/2483760

General Chair:
Mauro Pezzè,
Program Chair:
Mark Harman

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

In-Cooperation

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 July 2013

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ISSTA '13

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ISSTA '13: Iitsnternational Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 15 - 20, 2013

Lugano, Switzerland

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 58 of 213 submissions, 27%

Upcoming Conference

ISSTA '25

Sponsor:
sigsoft

34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

June 25 - 28, 2025

Trondheim , Norway

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

10
Total Citations
View Citations
257
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)8
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 22 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ismayilzada ERahman MKim DYi J(2023)Poracle: Testing Patches under Preservation Conditions to Combat the Overfitting Problem of Program RepairACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/362529333:2(1-39)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3625293
Venturini DCogo FPolato IGerosa MWiese I(2023)I Depended on You and You Broke Me: An Empirical Study of Manifesting Breaking Changes in Client PackagesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357603732:4(1-26)Online publication date: 26-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576037
Foo DChua HYeo JAng MSharma ALeavens GGarcia APăsăreanu C(2018)Efficient static checking of library updatesProceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3236024.3275535(791-796)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236024.3275535
Zanzig JFrancia III GFrancia X(2015)A Consensus of Thought in Applying Change Management to Information System EnvironmentsInternational Journal of Information System Modeling and Design10.4018/IJISMD.20151001026:4(24-41)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/IJISMD.2015100102
Yatoh KSakamoto KIshikawa FHoniden SYoung MXie T(2015)Feedback-controlled random test generationProceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2771783.2771805(316-326)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2771783.2771805
Yi JQi DTan SRoychoudhury A(2015)Software Change ContractsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/272997324:3(1-43)Online publication date: 13-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2729973
Dimopoulos SKrintz CWolski RGupta A(2015)SuperContraProceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering10.1109/IC2E.2015.70(283-286)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/IC2E.2015.70
Pastore FMariani LHyvärinen AFedyukovich GSharygina NSehestedt SMuhammad APăsăreanu CMarinov D(2014)Verification-aided regression testingProceedings of the 2014 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2610384.2610387(37-48)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2610384.2610387
Le WPattison SJalote PBriand LHoek A(2014)Patch verification via multiversion interprocedural control flow graphsProceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/2568225.2568304(1047-1058)Online publication date: 31-May-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2568225.2568304
Le TYi JLo DThung FRoychoudhury A(2014)Dynamic Inference of Change ContractsProceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution10.1109/ICSME.2014.72(451-455)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSME.2014.72

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents