Explicitly stated program invariants can help programmers by identifying program properties that must be preserved when modifying code. In practice, however, these invariants are usually implicit. An alternative to expecting programmers to fully annotate code with invariants is to automatically infer likely invariants from the program itself. This research focuses on dynamic techniques for discovering invariants from execution traces. This article reports three results. First, it describes techniques for dynamically discovering invariants, along with an implementation, named Daikon, that embodies these techniques. Second, it reports on the application of Daikon to two sets of target programs. In programs from Gries's work (1981) on program derivation, the system rediscovered predefined invariants. In a C program lacking explicit invariants, the system discovered invariants that assisted a software evolution task. These experiments demonstrate that, at least for small programs, invariant inference is both accurate and useful. Third, it analyzes scalability issues, such as invariant detection runtime and accuracy, as functions of test suites and program points instrumented.

Article Free Access Share on Dynamically discovering likely program invariants to support program evolution Authors: Michael D. Ernst Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle WA Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle WAView Profile , Jake Cockrell Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle WA Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle WAView Profile , William G. Griswold Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of California San Diego, 0114, La Jolla, CA Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of California San Diego, 0114, La Jolla, CAView Profile , David Notkin Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle WA Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle WAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ICSE '99: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineeringMay 1999 Pages 213–224https://doi.org/10.1145/302405.302467Published:16 May 1999Publication History 249citation1,521DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations249Total Downloads1,521Last 12 Months208Last 6 weeks71 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

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