A framework for the evaluation of specification miners based on finite state machines

Abstract

Software maintenance tasks, such as testing and program understanding, can benefit from formal specifications that describe how a program should use an API. Recently, there has been increasing interest in specification miners that automatically extract finite state specifications of method ordering constraints from existing software. However, comparing different mining approaches is difficult, because no common ground to evaluate the effectiveness of specification miners has been established yet. We present a framework for evaluating to which extent specification miners find valid finite state descriptions of API usage constraints. The framework helps in creating reference specifications and includes metrics to compare mined specifications to the reference specifications. The metrics are tailored for evaluating specification miners and account for imprecision and incompleteness in mined specifications. We use the framework to compare the effectiveness of three mining approaches and to show their respective benefits.