A qualitative analysis on the specification mining techniques

Abstract

Formal Specifications plays a vital role in several dimensions of software engineering such as testing, optimizing, refactoring, documenting, debugging and repair. Formal Specifications are generally descriptions for legal program behavior. In Conventional approaches, specifications are constructed manually and later automatic mining techniques emerges with mining rules focusing on temporal logic and language specifications. Addition of metrics in mining leads to improvement in performance and thereby providing a step towards the support for real world applications. This paper focuses on giving a detailed overview of specification mining techniques, thereby stating the need for specifications utility in industrial perspective. This paper also serves as a guide to gain additional knowledge and the impact of metrics over specification miners.