Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

I posted on the Informatics Europe blog  a short note about what Scopus sees as the hottest articles in computer science.

To verify software, we must specify it; otherwise there is nothing to verify against. People often cite the burden of specification as the major obstacle toward making verification practical. At issue are not only the effort required to express the goals of software elements (their contracts) but also intermediate assertions, or “verification conditions”, including loop invariants, required by the machinery of verification.

At a Microsoft Software Verification summer school [1] in Moscow on July 18 — the reason why there was no article on this blog last week — Stefan Tobies, one of the lecturers, made the following observation about the specification effort needed to produce fully verified software. In his experience, he said, the ratio of specification lines to program lines is three to one.

Such a specification explosion, to coin a phrase, has to be addressed by any practical approach to verification. It would be interesting to get estimates from others with verification experience.

Reducing specification explosion  is crucial to the Eiffel effort to provide “Verification As a Matter Of Course” [2]. The following three techniques should go a long way:

• Loop invariant inference. Programmers can be expected to write contracts expressing the purpose of routines (preconditions, postconditions) and classes (class invariants), but often balk at writing the intermediate assertions necessary to prove the correctness of loops. An earlier article [3] mentioned some ongoing work on this problem and I hope to come back to the topic.
• Frame conventions. As another recent article has discussed [4], a simple language convention can dramatically reduce the number of assertions by making frame conditions explicit.
• Model-based contracts. This technique calls for a separate article; the basic idea is to express the effect of operations through high-level mathematical models relying on a library that describe such mathematical abstractions as sets, relations, functions and graphs.

The risk of specification explosion is serious enough to merit a concerted defense.

References

[1] Summer School in Software Engineering and Verification, details here.

[2] Verification As a Matter Of Course, slides of a March 2010 talk, see an earlier article on this blog.

[3] Contracts written by people, contracts written by machines, an earlier article on this blog.

[4] If I’m not pure, at least my functions are, an earlier article on this blog.

I posted here a draft of a new article, Towards a Calculus of Object Programs.

Here is the abstract:

Verifying properties of object-oriented software requires a method for handling references in a simple and intuitive way, closely related to how O-O programmers reason about their programs. The method presented here, a Calculus of Object Programs, combines four components: compositional logic, a framework for describing program semantics and proving program properties; negative variables to address the specifics of O-O programming, in particular qualified calls; the alias calculus, which determines whether reference expressions can ever have the same value; and the calculus of object structures, a specification technique for the structures that arise during the execution of an object-oriented program.
The article illustrates the Calculus by proving the standard algorithm for reversing a linked list.

Lionel Briand and his group at the Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo have helped raise the standard for empirical research in testing and other software engineering practices by criticizing work that in their opinion relies on wrong assumptions or insufficiently supported evidence. In one of their latest papers [1] they take aim at “Adaptive Random Testing” (ART); one of the papers they criticize is from our group at ETH, on the ARTOO extension [2] to this testing method. Let’s examine the criticism!

We need a bit of background on random testing, ART, and ARTOO:

• Random testing tries inputs based on a random process rather than attempting a more sophisticated strategy; it was once derided as silly [3], but has emerged in recent years as a useful technique. Our AutoTest tool [4], now integrated in EiffelStudio, has shown it to be particularly effective when applied to code equipped with contracts, which provide built-in test oracles. As a result of this combination, testing can be truly automatic: the two most tedious tasks of traditional testing, test case preparation and test oracle definition, can be performed without human intervention.
• ART, developed by Chen and others [5], makes random testing not entirely random by ensuring that the inputs are spread reasonably evenly in the input domain.
• ARTOO, part of Ilinca Ciupa’s PhD thesis on testing defended in 2008,   generalized ART to object-oriented programs, by defining a notion of distance between objects; the ARTOO strategy  avoids choosing objects that are too close to each other. The distance formula, which you can find in[2], combines three elementary distances: between the types of the objects involved,  the values in their primitive fields (integers etc.), and, recursively, the objects to which they have references.

Arcuri and Briand dispute the effectiveness of ART and criticize arguments that various papers have used to show its effectiveness. About the ARTOO paper they write

The authors concluded that ART was better than random testing since it needed to sample less test cases before finding the first failure. However, ART was also reported as taking on average 1.6 times longer due to the distance calculations!

To someone not having read our paper the comment and the exclamation mark would seem to suggest that the paper somehow downplays this property of random testing, but in fact it stresses it repeatedly. The property appears for example in boldface as part of the caption to Table 2: In most cases ARTOO requires significantly less tests to find a fault, but entails a time overhead, and again in boldface in the caption to Table 3: The overhead that the distance calculations introduce in the testing process causes ARTOO to require on average 1.6 times more time than RAND to find the first fault.

There is no reason, then, to criticize the paper on this point. It reports the results clearly and fairly.

If we move the focus from the paper to the method, however, Arcuri and Briand have a point. As they correctly indicate, the number of tests to first fault is not a particularly useful criterion. In fact I argued against it in another paper on testing [6]

The number of tests is not that useful to managers, who need help deciding when to stop testing and ship, or to customers, who need an estimate of fault densities. More relevant is the testing time needed to uncover the faults. Otherwise we risk favoring strategies that uncover a failure quickly but only after a lengthy process of devising the test; what counts is total time. This is why, just as flies get out faster than bees, a seemingly dumb strategy such as random testing might be better overall.

(To understand the mention of flies and bees you need to read [6].) The same article states, as its final principle:

Principle 7: Assessment criteria A testing strategy’s most important property is the number of faults it uncovers as a function of time.

The ARTOO paper, which appeared early in our testing work, used “time to first failure” because it has long been a standard criterion in the testing literature, but it should have applied our own advice and focused on more important properties of testing strategies.

The “principles” paper [6] also warned against a risk awaiting anyone looking for new test strategies:

Testing research is vulnerable to a risky thought process: You hit upon an idea that seemingly promises improvements and follow your intuition. Testing is tricky; not all clever ideas prove helpful when submitted to objective evaluation.

The danger is that the clever ideas may result in so much strategy setup time that any benefit on the rest of the testing process is lost. This danger threatens testing researchers, including those who are aware of it.

The idea of ARTOO and object distance remains attractive, but more work is needed to make it an effective contributor to automated random testing and demonstrate that effectiveness. We can be grateful to Arcuri and Briand for their criticism, and I hope they continue to apply their iconoclastic zeal to empirical software engineering work, ours included.

I have objections of my own to their method. They write that “all the work in the literature is based either on simulations or case studies with unreasonably high failure rates”. This is incorrect for our work, which does not use simulations, relying instead on actual, delivered software, where AutoTest routinely finds faults in an automatic manner.

In contrast, however, Arcuri and Briand rely on fault seeding (also known as fault introduction or fault injection):

To obtain more information on how shapes appear in actual SUT, we carried out a large empirical analysis on 11 programs. For each program, a series of mutants were generated to introduce faults in these programs in a systematic way. Faults generated through mutation [allow] us to generate a large number of faults, in an unbiased and varied manner. We generated 3727 mutants and selected the 780 of them with lower detection probabilities to carry out our empirical analysis of faulty region shapes.

In the absence of objective evidence attesting to the realism of fault seeding, I do not believe any insights into testing obtained from such a methodology. In fact we adopted, from the start of our testing work, the principle that we would never rely on fault seeding. The problem with seeded faults is that there is no guarantee they reflect the true faults that programmers make, especially the significant ones. Techniques for fault seeding are understandably good at introducing typographical mistakes, such as a misspelling or the replacement of a “+” by a “-”; but these are not interesting kinds of fault, as they are easily caught by the compiler, by inspection, by low-tech static tools, or by simple tests. Interesting faults are those resulting from a logical error in the programmer’s mind, and in my experience (I do not know of good empirical studies on this topic) seeding techniques do not generate them.

For these reasons, all our testing research has worked on real software, and all the faults that AutoTest has found were real faults, resulting from a programmer’s mistake.

We can only apply this principle because we work with software equipped with contracts, where faults will be detected through the automatic oracle of a violated assertion clause. It is essential, however, to the credibility and practicality of any testing strategy; until I see evidence to the contrary, I will continue to disbelieve any testing insights resulting from studies based on artificial fault injection.

References

[1] Andrea Arcuri and Lionel Briand: Adaptive Random Testing: An Illusion of Effectiveness, in ISSTA 2011 (International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis), available here.

[2] Ilinca Ciupa, Andreas Leitner, Manuel Oriol and Bertrand Meyer: ARTOO: Adaptive Random Testing for Object-Oriented Software, in ICSE 2008: Proceedings of 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, Leipzig, 10-18 May 2008, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2008, also available here.

[3] Glenford J. Myers. The Art of Software Testing. Wiley, New York, 1979. Citation:

Probably the poorest methodology of all is random-input testing: the process of testing a program by selecting, at random, some subset of all possible input values. In terms of the probability of detecting the most errors, a randomly selected collection of test cases has little chance of being an optimal, or close to optimal, subset. What we look for is a set of thought processes that allow one to select a set of test data more intelligently. Exhaustive black-box and white-box testing are, in general, impossible, but a reasonable testing strategy might use elements of both. One can develop a reasonably rigorous test by using certain black-box-oriented test-case-design methodologies and then supplementing these test cases by examining the logic of the program (i.e., using white-box methods).

[4] Bertrand Meyer, Ilinca Ciupa, Andreas Leitner, Arno Fiva, Yi Wei and Emmanuel Stapf: Programs that Test Themselves, IEEE Computer, vol. 42, no. 9, pages 46-55, September 2009, available here. For practical uses of AutoTest within EiffelStudio see here.

[5] T. Y. Chen, H Leung and I K Mak: Adaptive Random Testing, in  Advances in Computer Science, ASIAN 2004, Higher-Level Decision Making,  ed. M.J. Maher,  Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3321, Springer-Verlag, pages 320-329, 2004, available here.

[6] Bertrand Meyer: Seven Principles of Software testing, in IEEE Computer, vol. 41, no. 10, pages 99-101, August 2008, also available here.

..

If I’m not pure, at least my jewels are [1].

..

We often need to be reassured that a routine, usually a function, is “pure”, meaning that it does not change the state of the computation. For example, a function used in a contract element (precondition, postcondition, class invariant, loop invariant) should be purely descriptive, since it is a specification element; evaluating it, typically for testing and debugging, should not create a change of behavior — a “Heisenberg effect” — in the very computation that it is intended to assess. Another application is in a concurrency context, particularly in SCOOP (see earlier posts and forthcoming ones): if one or more functions are pure, several of their executions can run  concurrently on the same object.

The notion of purity admits variants. The usual notion is what  [2] calls weak purity, which precludes changes to previously existing objects but allow creating new objects. In the EiffelBase library we also encounter routines that have another form of purity, which we may call “relative” purity: they can leave the same state on exit as they found on entry, but in-between they might change the state.  For the rest of this discussion we will rely on the standard notion of weak purity: no changes permitted on existing objects.

It is often suggested that the programming language should support specifying that a routine is pure; many people have indeed proposed the addition of a keyword such as pure to Eiffel. One of the reasons this is not — in my opinion — such a great idea is that purity is just a special case of the more general problem of framing: specifying and verifying what a routine does not change. If we can specify an arbitrary frame property, then we can, as a special case covered by the general mechanism, specify that a routine changes nothing.

To see why framing is so important, consider a class ACCOUNT with a routine deposit that has the postcondition

balance = old balance + sum………..— Where sum is the argument of deposit

Framing here means stating that nothing else than balance changes; for example the account’s owner and its number should remain the same. It is not practical to write all individual postcondition clauses such as

owner= old owner
number= old number

and so on. But we do need to specify these properties and enforce them, if only to avoid that a descendant class (maybe MAFIA_ACCOUNT) distort the rules defined by the original.

One technique is to add a so-called “modifies clause”, introduced by verification tools such as ESC-Java [3] and JML [4]. Modifies clauses raise some theoretical issues; in particular, the list of modified expressions is often infinite, so we must restrict ourselves to an abstract-data-type view where we characterize a class by commands and queries and the modifies clause only involves queries of the class. Many people find this hard to accept at first, since anything that is not talked about can change, but it is the right approach. A modifies clause of sorts, included in the postcondition, appeared in an earlier iteration of the Eiffel specification, with the keyword only (which is indeed preferable to modifies, which in the Eiffel style favoring grammatically simple keywords would be modify, since what we want to express is not that the routine must change anything at all  but that it may only change certain specified results!). The convention worked well with inheritance, since it included the rule that a clause such as only balance, in class  ACCOUNT, prescribes that the routine may not, in its modifies version as well as in any version redefined in descendants, change any other query known at the level of ACCOUNT; but a descendant version may change, subject to its own ACCOUNT clauses, any new query introduced by a descendant.

To declare a routine as pure, it would suffice to use an empty only clause (not very elegant syntactically — “only” what? — but one can get used to it).

This construct has been discarded, as it places too heavy a burden on the programmer-specifier. Here the key observation resulted from a non-scientific but pretty extensive survey I made of all the JML code I could get my hands on. I found that every time a query appeared in a modifies clause it was also listed in the postcondition! On reflection, this seems reasonable: if you are serious about specification, as anyone bothering to write such a clause surely is, you will not just express that something changes and stop there; you will write something about how it may change. Not necessarily the exact result, as in

my_query = precise_final_value

but at least some property of that result, as in

some_property (my_query)

This observation has, however, an inescapable consequence for language design: modifies or only clauses should be inferred by the compiler from the postcondition, not imposed on the programmer as an extra burden. The convention, which we may call the Implicit Framing Rule, is simple:

A routine may change the value of a query only if the query is specified in the routine’s postcondition

(or, if you like double negation, “no routine may change the value of a query other than those specified in its postcondition”). Here we say that a feature is “specified” in a postcondition if it appears there outside of the scope of an old expression. (Clearly, an occurrence such as old balance does not imply that balance can be modified, hence this restriction to occurrences outside of an old.)

With this convention the only clause becomes implicit: it would simply list all the queries specified in the postcondition, so there is no need for the programmer to write it. For the rare case of wanting to specify that a query q may change, but not wanting to specify how, it is easy to provide a library function, say involved, that always return true and can be used in postconditions, as in involved (q).

The convention is of course not just a matter of programming methodology but, in an IDE supporting verification, such as the EVE “Verification As a Matter Of Course” environment which we are building for Eiffel [5], the compiler will enforce the definition above — no change permitted to anything not specified in the postcondition — and produce an error in case of a violation. This also means that we can easily specify that a routine is pure: it must simply not specify any query in its postcondition. It may still list it in an old clause, as happens often in practice, e.g.

Result = old balance – Minimum_balance………..— In the postcondition of a function available_funds

Note the need to use old here. Apart from this addition of old to some postconditions, a considerable advantage of the convention is that most existing code using pure functions will be suitable to the new purity enforcement without any need to provide new annotations.

I believe that this is the only sustainable convention. It does not, of course, solve the frame problem by itself (for attempts in this direction see [6, 7]), but it is a necessary condition for a solution that is simple, easily taught, fairly easily implemented, and effective. It goes well with model-based specifications [8, 9], which I believe are the technique of most promise for usable  specifications of object-oriented software. And it provides a straightforward, no-frills way to enforce purity where prescribed by the Command-Query Separation principle [10, 11]: if I’m not pure, at least my functions must be.

References

[1] From the lyrics of the aria Glitter and Be Gay in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, text by Lillian Hellman and others. Youtube offers several performances, including  by Diana Damrau (here) and Natalie Dessay (here) . For the text see e.g. here.

[2] Adam Darvas and Peter Müller: Reasoning About Method Calls in Interface Specifications, in Journal of Object Technology, Volume 5, no. 5, jUNE 2006, pages 59-85, doi:10.5381/jot.2006.5.5.a3, available here.

[3] C. Flanagan, K.R.M. Leino, M. Lillibridge, G. Nelson, J. B. Saxe and R. Stata: Extended static checking for Java, in PLDI 2002 (Programming Language Design and Implementation), pages 234–245, 2002.

[4] Gary Leavens et al.: Java Modeling Language, see references here.

[5] Julian Tschannen, Carlo A. Furia, Martin Nordio, and Bertrand Meyer: Verifying Eiffel Programs with Boogie, to appear in Boogie 2011, First International Workshop on Intermediate Verification Languages, Wroclaw, August 2011. See documentation about the EVE project on the project page.

[6] Ioannis Kassios: Dynamic Frames: Support for Framing, Dependencies and Sharing Without Restrictions, in Formal Methods 2006, eds. J. Misra, T. Nipkow and E. Sekerinski, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4085, Springer Verlag, 2006, pages 268-283.

[7] Bernd Schoeller: Making Classes Provable through Contracts, Models and Frames, PhD thesis, ETH Zurich, 2007, available here

[8] Bernd Schoeller, Tobias Widmer and Bertrand Meyer: Making Specifications Complete Through Models, in Architecting Systems with Trustworthy Components, eds. Ralf Reussner, Judith Stafford and Clemens Szyperski, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 2006, available here.

[9] Nadia Polikarpova, Carlo Furia and Bertrand Meyer: Specifying Reusable Components, in Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments (VSTTE ’10), Edinburgh, UK, 16-19 August 2010, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, 2010, available here.

[10] Bertrand Meyer: Object-Oriented Software Construction, first (1988) and second (1997) editions, Prentice Hall.

[11] Bertrand Meyer: Touch of Class: An Introduction to Programming Well, Using Objects and Contracts, Springer Verlag, 2009.