Assume-guarantee verification of software components in SOFA 2 framework

A key problem in compositional model checking of software systems is that typical model checkers accept only closed systems (runnable programs) and therefore a component cannot be model-checked directly. A typical solution is to create an artificial environment for the component such that its composition forms a runnable program that can be model-checked. Although it is possible to create a universal environment that performs all possible sequences and interleavings of calls of the component´s methods, for practical purposes it is sufficient to capture in this way just the use of the component in a particular software system - this idea is expressed by the paradigm of assume-guarantee reasoning. The authors present an approach to assume-guarantee-based verification of software systems in the context of the SOFA 2 component framework. They provide an overview of the approach to the construction of an artificial environment for the verification of SOFA 2 components implemented in Java with the Java PathFinder model checker. They also show the benefits of their approach on results of experiments with a non-trivial software system and discuss its advantages over other approaches with similar goals.