Using Analysis Patterns to Uncover Specification Errors

Developing or maintaining a formal software specification is a task unfortunately prone to the accidental introduction of logical errors, particularly inconsistencies. At worst, such errors can be dangerously misleading. For example, many software analysis tools that require a formal specification as input produce false positives when faced with inconsistency, making it more likely that developers miss errors in the software. At the same time, most existing analysis tools supporting specification development are not well suited to the detection of inconsistencies without explicit direction from an expert user. To address this shortcoming, this paper presents novel analysis “patterns” that can automatically guide specifiers through logical pitfalls of this kind by not only checking a given specification formula, but recursively checking the subformulae of that formula. By doing so, rather than present a specifier with potentially misleading feedback, use of these patterns can automatically ensure—without expert direction—that accidentally introduced inconsistencies are uncovered.