Consistency of Java run-time behavior with design-time specifications

Abstract

We present a novel framework for formal verification of run-time behaviour of Java programs. We focus on the class of programs with a repetitive behaviour, such as servers and interactive programs, including programs exhibiting concurrency and non-determinism. The design-time specifications for such programs can be specified as UML-like finite-state diagrams, or Kripke structures, in the terminology of model checking. In order to verify the run-time behavior of a Java program, we extract a state diagram from the execution trace of the Java program and check whether the run-time state diagram is consistent with the design-time diagram. We have implemented this framework as an extension of JIVE (Java Interactive Visualization Environment), a state-of-the-art dynamic analysis and visualization tool which constructs object, sequence, and state diagrams for Java program executions. JIVE is available as an open-source plugin for Eclipse and makes available the execution trace for facilitating analyses of program executions. We have tested our extension on a number of programs, and our experiments show that our methodology is effective in helping close the gap between the design and implementation of Java programs.