verification; validation; guided search; model checking; structural heuristics
Description/Abstract
Software verification using model checking often translates programs into corresponding transition systems that model the program behavior. As software systems continue to grow in complexity and size, exhaustively checking a property on a transition graph becomes difficult. The goal of guided search heuristics in model checking is to find a counterexample to the property being verified as quickly as possible in the transition graph. The FSM distance heuristic builds an interprocedural control flow graph of the program to estimate distance to a possible error state. It ignores calling context and underestimates the true distance to the error.