An Approach to High-Level Behavioral Program Documentation Allowing Lightweight Verification

Abstract

Typically, multiple developers are involved in the various stages of the software development and maintenance process. To ensure an optimal transfer of knowledge between these different peers, a reliable human-readable model of the dynamics of a software artefact is needed. Once these models become machine-verifiable, they can be used throughout an application's lifetime to check whether the documented behavioral properties continue to hold as the application evolves. Unfortunately, most existing modeling media are inadequate to express human-readable behavioral models which are at the same time machine-verifiable. We therefore propose a declarative platform wherein behavioral program models can be expressed in terms of user-defined high-level concepts and be automatically verified against an application's actual behavior. We demonstrate our approach by using it to both document and verify an interpreter for a garbage-collected programming language