Modelling program verification tools for software engineers

In software engineering, models are used for many different things. In this paper, we focus on program verification, where we use models to reason about the correctness of systems. There are many different types of program verification techniques which provide different correctness guarantees. We investigate the domain of program verification tools, and present a concise megamodel to distinguish these tools. We also present a data set of almost 400 program verification tools. This data set includes the category of verification tool according to our megamodel, practical information such as input/output format, repository links, and more. The categorisation enables software engineers to find suitable tools, investigate similar alternatives and compare them. We also identify trends for each level in our megamodel based on the categorisation. Our data set, publicly available at https://doi.org/10.4121/20347950, can be used by software engineers to enter the world of program verification and find a verification tool based on their requirements.