Mining parametric specifications

Abstract

Specifications carrying formal parameters that are bound to concrete data at runtime can effectively and elegantly capture multi-object behaviors or protocols. Unfortunately, parametric specifications are not easy to formulate by nonexperts and, consequently, are rarely available. This paper presents a general approach for mining parametric specifications from program executions, based on a strict separation of concerns: (1) a trace slicer first extracts sets of independent interactions from parametric execution traces; and (2) the resulting non-parametric trace slices are then passed to any conventional non-parametric property learner. The presented technique has been implemented in jMiner, which has been used to automatically mine many meaningful and non-trivial parametric properties of OpenJDK 6.