Technical Report Guided Reverse Analysis of Contingent Properties

Many useful properties that might be discovered from a component in a large software system do not depend solely on the code for that component but rather are contingent upon properties of that component’s environment. This paper describes a novel approach for adapting modular analyses, based on abstract interpretation, to run in reverse direction in order to discover a property that—if assumed about the environment of a component—is sufficient to guarantee that some contingent property of that component is also satisfied. This reverse analysis is guided by the results of the original modular analysis, so that it can choose a suitable sufficient condition when there is no best one. Furthermore, the conditions that must be met by a reverse analysis are formally presented, and the process of designing a guided reverse analysis is illustrated through the development of a constant-value analysis.