Towards Succinctness in Mining Scenario-Based Specifications

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Publication Date

4-2011

Abstract

Specification mining methods are used to extract candidate specifications from system execution traces. A major challenge for specification mining is succinctness. That is, in addition to the soundness, completeness, and scalable performance of the specification mining method, one is interested in producing a succinct result, which conveys a lot of information about the system under investigation but uses a short, machine and human-readable representation. In this paper we address the succinctness challenge in the context of scenario-based specification mining, whose target formalism is live sequence charts (LSC), an expressive extension of classical sequence diagrams. We do this by adapting three classical notions: a definition of an equivalence relation over LSCs, a definition of a redundancy and inclusion relation based on isomorphic embeddings among LSCs, and a delta-discriminative measure based on an information gain metric on a sorted set of LSCs. These are applied on top of the commonly used statistical metrics of support and confidence. A number of case studies show the utility of our approach towards succinct mined specifications.

Keywords

Live Sequence Charts, Scenario-Based Specifications, Specification Mining, Succinctness

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software Systems

Publication

16th IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2011): Proceedings, 27-29 April 2011, Las Vegas, Nevada

First Page

231

Last Page

240

ISBN

9780769543819

Identifier

10.1109/ICECCS.2011.30

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Las Vegas, NV

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICECCS.2011.30

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