Precision reuse for efficient regression verification

  • Authors:

  • Dirk Beyer;Stefan Löwe;Evgeny Novikov;Andreas Stahlbauer;Philipp Wendler

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Passau, Germany;University of Passau, Germany;ISP RAS, Russia;University of Passau, Germany;University of Passau, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Continuous testing during development is a well-established technique for software-quality assurance. Continuous model checking from revision to revision is not yet established as a standard practice, because the enormous resource consumption makes its application impractical. Model checkers compute a large number of verification facts that are necessary for verifying if a given specification holds. We have identified a category of such intermediate results that are easy to store and efficient to reuse: abstraction precisions. The precision of an abstract domain specifies the level of abstraction that the analysis works on. Precisions are thus a precious result of the verification effort and it is a waste of resources to throw them away after each verification run. In particular, precisions are reasonably small and thus easy to store; they are easy to process and have a large impact on resource consumption. We experimentally show the impact of precision reuse on industrial verification problems created from 62 Linux kernel device drivers with 1119 revisions.