Extended program invariants: applications in testing and fault localization
Mohammad Amin Alipour, Alex Groce · 2012
Invariants are powerful tools for program analysis and reasoning.Several tools and techniques have been developed to infer invariants of a program. Given a test suite for a program, an invariant detection tool (IDT) extracts (potential) invariants from the program execution on test cases of the test suite. The resultant invariants contain relations only over variables and constants that are visible to the IDT. IDTs are usually unable to extract invariants about execution features like taken branches, since programs usually do not have state variables for such features. Thus, the IDT has no information about such features in order to infer relations between them. We speculate that invariants about execution features are useful for understanding test suites; we call these invariants, extended invariants.