Combining dynamic and static analysis to help develop correct graph transformations

Abstract

Developing provably correct graph transformations is not a trivial task. Besides writing the code, a developer must as well specify the pre- and post-conditions. The objective of our work is to assist developers in producing such a Hoare triple in order to submit it to a formal verification tool. By combining static and dynamic analysis, we aim at providing more useful feedback to developers. Dynamic analysis helps identify inconsistencies between the code and its specifications. Static analysis facilitates extracting the pre- and post-conditions from the code. Based on this proposal, we implemented a prototype that allows running, testing and proving graph transformations written in small-tALC, our own transformation language.