Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments (Pb)

A Step Towards Verified Software Worries about the reliability of software are as old as software itself; techniques for allaying these worries predate even James King’s 1969 thesis on “A program verifier. ” What gives the whole topic a new urgency is the conjunction of three phenomena: the blitz-like spread of software-rich systems to control ever more facets of our world and our lives; our growing impatience with deficiencies; and the development―proceeding more slowly, alas, than the other two trends―of techniques to ensure and verify software quality. In 2002 Tony Hoare, one of the most distinguished contributors to these advances over the past four decades, came to the conclusion that piecemeal efforts are no longer sufficient and proposed a “Grand Challenge” intended to achieve, over 15 years, the production of a verifying compiler: a tool that while processing programs would also guarantee their adherence to specified properties of correctness, robustness, safety, security and other desirable properties. As Hoare sees it, this endeavor is not a mere research project, as might normally be carried out by one team or a small consortium of teams, but a momentous endeavor, comparable in its scope to the successful mission to send a man to the moon or to the sequencing of the human genome.

This state-of-the-art survey is an outcome of the first IFIP TC 2/WG 2.3 working conference on Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments, VSTTE 2005, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in October 2005. This was a historic event gathering many top international experts on systematic methods for specifying, building and verifying high-quality software.

The book includes 32 revised full papers and 27 revised position papers, preceded by a general introduction to the area, which also presents the vision of a grand challenge project: the "verifying compiler". Most contributions are followed by a transcription of the vivid discussion that ensued between the author and the audience. The papers have been organized in topical sections on verification tools, guaranteeing correctness, software engineering aspects, verifying object-oriented programming, programming language and methodology aspects, components, static analysis, design, analysis and tools, as well as formal techniques.