Simple dynamic assertions for interactive program validation

ABSTRACT

It is well known that more than 50% of software life cycle costs are caused by maintenance activities: testing, debugging, modification, regression testing, and documentation updating. Therefore the importance of the validation and verification process in software development cannot be overstated. An interesting technique introduced by Stucki is to instrument a program with dynamic assertions. The assertions, which are logical expressions regarding program variables, are entered into the program as comments, after which a preprocessor generates and inserts the code for dynamically checking the validity of these assertions. A number of papers describe more or less sophisticated and complicated ways of using dynamic assertions in test systems. The aim of this paper is not to analyze and compare these approaches with each other or with our proposal, but rather to convey the advantages of a simple, user-friendly system based on dynamic assertions for expressing constraints, transactions, and transition constraints.

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