Michael Achenbach, Klaus Ostermann. Engineering Abstractions in Model Checking and Testing. In Ninth IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, SCAM 2009, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, September 20-21, 2009. pages 137-146, IEEE Computer Society, 2009. [doi]
Abstractions are used in model checking to tackle problems like state space explosion or modeling of IO. The application of these abstractions in real software development processes, however, lacks engineering support. This is one reason why model checking is not widely used in practice yet and testing is still state of the art in falsification. We show how user-defined abstractions can be integrated into a Java PathFinder setting with tools like AspectJ or Javassist and discuss implications of remaining weaknesses of these tools. We believe that a principled engineering approach to designing and implementing abstractions will improve the applicability of model checking in practice.