Partial Verification of Software Components: Heuristics for Environment Construction

Code model checking of software components suffers from the well-known problem of state explosion when applied to highly parallel components, despite the fact that a single component typically comprises a smaller state space than the whole system. We present a technique that mitigates the problem of state explosion in code checking of primitive components with the Java PathFinder in case the checked property is absence of concurrency errors. The key idea is to reduce parallelism in the calling protocol on the basis of the information provided by static analysis searching for concurrency-related patterns in the component code; by a heuristic, some of the pattern instances are denoted as "suspicious". Then, the environment (needed to be available since Java PathFinder checks only complete programs) is generated from a reduced calling protocol so that it exercises in parallel only those parts of the component's code that likely contain concurrency errors.