Discovering algebraic specifications from Java classes

Abstract

We present and evaluate an automatic tool for extracting algebraic specifications from Java classes. Our tool maps a Java class to an algebraic signature and then uses the signature to generate a large number of terms. The tool evaluates these terms and based on the results of the evaluation, it proposes equations. Finally, the tool generalizes equations to axioms and eliminates many redundant axioms. Since our tool uses dynamic information, it is not guaranteed to be sound or complete. However, we manually inspected the axioms generated in our experiments and found them all to be correct. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.