Application of an informal program verification method to Ada

Abstract

The QDA informal program verifcation method is a comments analysis technique in which an analyst's assumptions about a program are expressed in the form of structured comments in the program and are checked by an analyzer. Previous work has shown QDA to be effective for detecting errors in assembly language programs. An experiment was performed to determine how well QDA would scale to high-level languages. The implementation and use of a prototype analyzer for Ada indicated both the usefulness of QDA for high level languages and the desirability for further development of the prototype.<>