Tool Support for Correctness-by-Construction [chapter]

Tobias Runge, Ina Schaefer, Loek Cleophas, Thomas Thüm, Derrick Kourie, Bruce W. Watson
2019 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
Correctness-by-Construction (CbC) is an approach to incrementally create formally correct programs guided by pre-and postcondition specifications. A program is created using refinement rules that guarantee the resulting implementation is correct with respect to the specification. Although CbC is supposed to lead to code with a low defect rate, it is not prevalent, especially because appropriate tool support is missing. To promote CbC, we provide tool support for CbC-based program development.
more » ... present CorC, a graphical and textual IDE to create programs in a simple while-language following the CbC approach. Starting with a specification, our open source tool supports CbC developers in refining a program by a sequence of refinement steps and in verifying the correctness of these refinement steps using the theorem prover KeY. We evaluated the tool with a set of standard examples on CbC where we reveal errors in the provided specification. The evaluation shows that our tool reduces the verification time in comparison to post-hoc verification.
doi:10.1007/978-3-030-16722-6_2 fatcat:hjsfdbx4ingxxhmqtwlqkj7nhy