research-article

Elements of Style: Analyzing a Software Design Feature with a Counterexample Detector

Authors:

Daniel Jackson,

Craig A. DamonAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Volume 22, Issue 7

Pages 484 - 495

https://doi.org/10.1109/32.538605

Published: 01 July 1996 Publication History

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Abstract

We demonstrate how Nitpick, a specification checker, can be applied to the design of a style mechanism for a word processor. The design is cast, along with some expected properties, in a subset of Z. Nitpick checks a property by enumerating all possible cases within some finite bounds, displaying as a counterexample the first case for which the property fails to hold. Unlike animation or execution tools, Nitpick does not require state transitions to be expressed constructively, and unlike theorem provers, Nitpick operates completely automatically without user intervention. Using a variety of reduction mechanisms, it can cover an enormous number of cases in a reasonable time, so that subtle flaws can be rapidly detected.

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Elements of Style: Analyzing a Software Design Feature with a Counterexample Detector

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Reviews

Reviewer: Richard A. Baker

Jackson and Damon present an interesting approach to the validation of functional specifications by means of a counterexample detector. This counterexample detector, called Nitpick, examines a product feature specification and presents a set of cases that demonstrate conflicts in the specification. The specifications must be written in a subset of the Z language. The authors describe the use of Nitpick in the validation of the paragraph style function for several existing commercial word processing programs. In these trials, several counterexamples were discovered. However, only a small subset of the specifications for a word processor could be handled within the available time, due to the enormous size of the set of possible examples. To address the test set size, the authors describe a number of algorithms that were used to reduce the number of searches needed to find the counterexamples. These approaches alone make this paper worth reading. This well-organized and well-written paper should serve as an example to the technical community of how to convey complex ideas.

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Published In

cover image IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Volume 22, Issue 7

Special issue: best papers of the 1996 international symposium on software testing and analysis ISSTA'96

July 1996

87 pages

ISSN:0098-5589

Editors:
Richard A. Kemmerer
Univ. of California,Santa Barbara
,
Laura K. Dillon
Univ. of California,Santa Barbara
,
Steven Zeil
Old Dominion Univ.,Norfolk,VA

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Fifteen Years of Formal Property Verification in Intel

Verification of a wireless ATM medium-access protocol

An integrated environment for HDL verification

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