FLAVERS: A finite state verification technique for software systems

Software systems are increasing in size and complexity and, subsequently, are becoming ever more difficult to validate. Finite state verification (FSV) has been gaining credibility and attention as an alternative to testing and to formal verification approaches based on theorem proving. There has recently been a great deal of excitement about the potential for FSV approaches to prove properties about hardware descriptions but, for the most part, these approaches do not scale adequately to handle the complexity usually found in software. In this paper, we describe an FSV approach that creates a compact and conservative, but imprecise, model of the system being analyzed, and then assists the analyst in adding additional details as guided by previous analysis results. This paper describes this approach and a prototype implementation called FLAVERS, presents a detailed example, and then provides some experimental results demonstrating scalability.