Research summary for dynamic detection of program invariants

Abstract

Explicitly stated program invariants can help programmers by identifying program properties that must be preserved when modifying code; invariants also play a number of other valuable roles in program development and evolution. In practice, however, these invariants are usually implicit. An alternative to expecting programmers to fully annotate code with invariants is to automatically infer invariants from the program itself. This research aims to develop and evaluate dynamic techniques for discovering invariants from execution traces. Our hypothesis is that such techniques are effective at extracting invariants from programs and that the extracted invariants are useful to programmers. Experiments with our prototype implementation provide preliminary support for this hypothesis.