Mining modal scenario-based specifications from execution traces of reactive systems

David Lo, Shahar Maoz, Siau-Cheng Khoo
2007 Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering - ASE '07  
Specification mining is a dynamic analysis process aimed at automatically inferring suggested specifications of a program from its execution traces. We describe a novel method, framework, and tool, for mining inter-object scenario-based specifications in the form of a UML2-compliant variant of Damm and Harel's Live Sequence Charts (LSC). LSC extends the classical partial order semantics of sequence diagrams with temporal liveness and symbolic class level lifelines, in order to generate compact
more » ... nd expressive specifications. The output of our algorithm is a sound and complete set of statistically significant LSCs (i.e., satisfying given thresholds of support and confidence), mined from an input execution trace. We locate statistically significant LSCs by exploring the search space of possible LSCs and checking for their statistical significance. In addition, we use an effective search space pruning strategy, specifically adapted to LSCs, which enables efficient mining of scenarios of arbitrary size. We demonstrate and evaluate the utility of our work in mining informative specifications using a case study on Jeti, a popular, full featured messaging application.
doi:10.1145/1321631.1321710 dblp:conf/kbse/LoMK07 fatcat:nzmfxuety5aa3miulr57vo2j4q