Chapman & Hall/CRC Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Series Year 2011 Peer-reviewed
BibTeX PDF
Computer Science · Research

Mining Software Specifications: Methodologies and Applications

David Lo Siau-Cheng Khoo Jiawei Han Chao Liu
Peer-reviewed
Type
2011
Publication year
—
—
§ Abstract

Summary

Software specifications — including API contracts, type annotations, and behavioral invariants — are critical for program analysis, yet are often missing or incomplete in real-world codebases. We present an approach for mining specifications from existing software, using a combination of dynamic invariant inference and static analysis of API usage patterns. The approach extracts candidate specifications from execution traces and source code, then validates them against a larger corpus of usage scenarios. We evaluate the approach on Java and JavaScript codebases, finding that it recovers 71% of known specifications and proposes 142 new ones that pass manual expert review.

Cite this paper — BibTeX 
@book {mining-software-specs,
    author = {David Lo and Siau-Cheng Khoo and Jiawei Han and Chao Liu},
    title = {Mining Software Specifications: Methodologies and Applications},
    year = 2011,
    month = may,
    publisher = {Chapman \& Hall/CRC Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Series}
}
Copied