Invited Talk: "Model checking" software with VeriSoft

Abstract

VeriSoft is a tool for systematically testing concurrent reactive software systems. It explores the state space (dynamic behavior) of a system by driving and observing the execution of its components using a run-time scheduler, and by reinitializing their execution. This systematic state-space exploration is performed using model-checking algorithms and makes heavy use of so-called "partial-order reduction" techniques. By default, VeriSoft searches state spaces for violations of user-specified assertions and coordination problems (deadlocks, crashes, etc.) between concurrent components. With its first prototype developed in 1996 (published at POPL'97), VeriSoft is the first software model checker for general-purpose programming languages like C and C++.Since made publicly available in 1999, VeriSoft has been licensed to hundreds of users in industry and academia. Inside Lucent Technologies, it was applied successfully to analyze several software products in various business units and application domains (switch maintenance, call processing, network management, etc.). Because VeriSoft can automatically generate, execute and evaluate thousands of tests per minute, it can quickly reveal behaviors that are virtually impossible to detect using conventional testing techniques.In this talk, I will present VeriSoft, what it does, how it works, industrial applications, strengths and limitations, technology-transfer issues, and discuss the current status of this project as well as related work and future work.