Runtime Verification: A Hands-On Approach in Java

This book provides a hands-on introduction to runtime verification which guides the reader from zero to sufficient practical knowledge required to consider and apply it in industry. It starts with almost no assumptions on the knowledge of the reader and provides exercises throughout the book through which the reader builds their own runtime verification tool. All that is required are basic programming skills and a good working knowledge of the object-oriented paradigm, ideally Java.

Drawing from years of the authors' real-world experience, the reader progresses from manually writing runtime verification code to instrumenting monitoring using aspect-oriented programming, after which they explore increasing levels of specification abstraction: automata, regular expressions, and linear time temporal logic. A range of other topics is also explored in the book, including real-time properties, concerns of efficiency and persistence, integration with testing and architectural considerations.

The book is written for graduate students specializing in software engineering as well as for industry professionals who need an introduction to the topic of runtime verification. While the book focuses on underlying foundations and practical techniques, it additionally provides for each chapter a reading list in the appendix for the interested reader who would like to deepen their knowledge in a particular area.

Gordon J. Pace is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Malta. His research has focussed on software and hardware verification since the 1990s, and in particular on runtime verification for over 15 years. He was involved in various projects exploring the introduction of the use of runtime verification in the industry, and has delivered various courses aimed at undergraduates, graduate students and professionals on the topic.