A Review Approach to Detecting Violations of Consistency between Specification and Program Structures

The application of specification-based program verification techniques (e.g., black-box testing, formal proof) faces strong challenges in practice when the gap between the structure of a specification and that of its program is large. This paper describes a viewbased program review approach to addressing these challenges. The essential idea of the approach is first to derive comparable views from the specification and program, and then detect and eliminate the violations of structural consistency in the program views on the basis of a set of criteria. We also developed a prototype tool to support the review approach, and conducted a case study to assess the effectiveness of the approach.