TzuYu: Learning stateful typestates

Behavioral models are useful for various software engineering tasks. They are, however, often missing in practice. Thus, specification mining was proposed to tackle this problem. Existing work either focuses on learning simple behavioral models such as finite-state automata, or relies on techniques...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: XIAO, Hao, SUN, Jun, LIU, Yang, LIN, Shang-Wei, SUN, Chengnian
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5007
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6010/viewcontent/ASE_2013_TzuYu.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Behavioral models are useful for various software engineering tasks. They are, however, often missing in practice. Thus, specification mining was proposed to tackle this problem. Existing work either focuses on learning simple behavioral models such as finite-state automata, or relies on techniques (e.g., symbolic execution) to infer finite-state machines equipped with data states, referred to as stateful typestates. The former is often inadequate as finite-state automata lack expressiveness in capturing behaviors of data-rich programs, whereas the latter is often not scalable. In this work, we propose a fully automated approach to learn stateful typestates by extending the classic active learning process to generate transition guards (i.e., propositions on data states). The proposed approach has been implemented in a tool called TzuYu and evaluated against a number of Java classes. The evaluation results show that TzuYu is capable of learning correct stateful typestates more efficiently.