General LTL Specification Mining (T)

Abstract

Temporal properties are useful for describing and reasoning about software behavior, but developers rarely write down temporal specifications of their systems. Prior work on inferring specifications developed tools to extract likely program specifications that fit particular kinds of tool-specific templates. This paper introduces Texada, a new temporal specification mining tool for extracting specifications in linear temporal logic (LTL) of arbitrary length and complexity. Texada takes a user-defined LTL property type template and a log of traces as input and outputs a set of instantiations of the property type (i.e., LTL formulas) that are true on the traces in the log. Texada also supports mining of almost invariants: properties with imperfect confidence. We formally describe Texada's algorithms and evaluate the tool's performance and utility.