Challenges of Software Verification (Intelligent Systems Reference Library, 238)

This book provides an overview about the open challenges in software verification. Software verification is a branch of software engineering aiming at guaranteeing that software applications satisfy some requirements of interest. Over the years, the software verification community has proposed and considered several techniques: abstract interpretation, data-flow analysis, type systems, model checking are just a few examples. The theoretical advances have been always motivated by practical challenges that have led to an equal evolution of both these sides of software verification. Indeed, several verification tools have been proposed by the research community and any software application, in order to guarantee that certain software requirements are met, needs to integrate a verification phase in its life cycle, independently of the context of application or software size. This book is aimed at collecting contributions discussing recent advances in facing open challenges in software verification, relying on a broad spectrum of verification techniques. This book collects contributions ranging from theoretical to practical arguments, and it is aimed at both researchers in software verification and their practitioners.