A hands-on Java PathFinder tutorial

Abstract

Java Pathfinder (JPF) is an open source analysis system that automatically verifies Java programs. The JPF tutorial provides an opportunity to software engineering researchers and practitioners to learn about JPF, be able to install and run JPF, and understand the concepts required to extend JPF. The hands-on tutorial will expose the attendees to the basic architecture framework of JPF, demonstrate the ways to use it for analyzing their artifacts, and illustrate how they can extend JPF to implement their own analyses. One of the defining qualities of JPF is its extensibility. JPF has been extended to support symbolic execution, directed automated random testing, different choice generation, configurable state abstractions, various heuristics for enabling bug detection, configurable search strategies, checking temporal properties and many more. JPF supports these extensions at the design level through a set of stable well defined interfaces. The interfaces are designed to not require changes to the core, yet enable the development of various JPF extensions. In this tutorial we provide attendees a hands on experience of developing different interfaces in order to extend JPF. The tutorial is targeted toward a general software engineering audience-software engineering researchers and practitioners. The attendees need to have a good understanding of the Java programming language and be fairly comfortable with Java program development. The attendees are not required to have any background in Java Pathfinder, software model checking or any other formal verification techniques. The tutorial will be self-contained.