Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Atif Mashkoor

Publications and source records attributed to Atif Mashkoor.

17 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2025

Failure divergence refinement for Event-B

When validating formal models, sizable effort goes into ensuring two types of properties: safety properties (nothing bad happens) and liveness properties (something good occurs eventually. Event-B supports checking safety properties all through the refinement chain. The same is not valid for liveness properties. Liveness properties are commonly validated with additional techniques like animation, and results do not transfer quickly, leading to re-doing the validation process at every refinement stage. This paper promotes early validation by providing failure divergence refinement semantics for Event-B. We show that failure divergence refinement preserves trace properties, which comprise many liveness properties, under certain natural conditions. Consequently, re-validation of those properties becomes unnecessary. Our result benefits data refinements, where no abstract behavior should be removed during refinement. Furthermore, we lay out an algorithm and provide a tool for automatic failure divergence refinement checking, significantly decreasing the modeler's workload. The tool is compared and evaluated in the context of sizable case studies.

cs.LO↗
arXiv2024

Application of AI to formal methods - an analysis of current trends

Context: With artificial intelligence (AI) being well established within the daily lives of research communities, we turn our gaze toward formal methods (FM). FM aim to provide sound and verifiable reasoning about problems in computer science. Objective: We conduct a systematic mapping study to overview the current landscape of research publications that apply AI to FM. We aim to identify how FM can benefit from AI techniques and highlight areas for further research. Our focus lies on the previous five years (2019-2023) of research. Method: Following the proposed guidelines for systematic mapping studies, we searched for relevant publications in four major databases, defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, and applied extensive snowballing to uncover potential additional sources. Results: This investigation results in 189 entries which we explored to find current trends and highlight research gaps. We find a strong focus on AI in the area of theorem proving while other subfields of FM are less represented. Conclusions: The mapping study provides a quantitative overview of the modern state of AI application in FM. The current trend of the field is yet to mature. Many primary studies focus on practical application, yet we identify a lack of theoretical groundwork, standard benchmarks, or case studies. Further, we identify issues regarding shared training data sets and standard benchmarks.

cs.LO↗
arXiv2023

Validation-Driven Development

Formal methods play a fundamental role in asserting the correctness of requirements specifications. However, historically, formal method experts have primarily focused on verifying those specifications. Although equally important, validation of requirements specifications often takes the back seat. This paper introduces a validation-driven development (VDD) process that prioritizes validating requirements in formal development. The VDD process is built upon problem frames - a requirements analysis approach - and validation obligations (VOs) - the concept of breaking down the overall validation of a specification and linking it to refinement steps. The effectiveness of the VDD process is demonstrated through a case study in the aviation industry.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2022

Trace Refinement in B and Event-B

Traces are used to show whether a model complies with the intended behavior. A modeler can use trace checking to ensure the preservation of the model behavior during the refinement process. In this paper, we present a trace refinement technique and tool called BERT that allows designers to ensure the behavioral integrity of high-level traces at the concrete level. The proposed technique is evaluated within the context of the B and Event-B methods on industrial-strength case studies from the automotive domain.

cs.LO↗
arXiv2022

Balanced Knowledge Distribution among Software Development Teams -- Observations from Open-Source and Closed-Source Software Development

In software development teams, developer turnover is among the primary reasons for project failures as it leads to a great void of knowledge and strain for the newcomers. Unfortunately, no established methods exist to measure how knowledge is distributed among development teams. Knowing how this knowledge evolves and is owned by key developers in a project helps managers reduce risks caused by turnover. To this end, this paper introduces a novel, realistic representation of domain knowledge distribution: the ConceptRealm. To construct the ConceptRealm, we employ a latent Dirichlet allocation model to represent textual features obtained from 300k issues and 1.3M comments from 518 open-source projects. We analyze whether the newly emerged issues and developers share similar concepts or how aligned the developers' concepts are with the team over time. We also investigate the impact of leaving members on the frequency of concepts. Finally, we evaluate the soundness of our approach to closed-source software, thus allowing the validation of the results from a practical standpoint. We find out that the ConceptRealm can represent the high-level domain knowledge within a team and can be utilized to predict the alignment of developers with issues. We also observe that projects exhibit many keepers independent of project maturity and that abruptly leaving keepers harm the team's concept familiarity.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2022

Application of Validation Obligations to Security Concerns

Our lives become increasingly dependent on safety- and security-critical systems, so formal techniques are advocated for engineering such systems. One of such techniques is validation obligations that enable formalizing requirements early in development to ensure their correctness. Furthermore, validation obligations help hold requirements consistent in an evolving model and create assurances about the model's completeness. Although initially proposed for safety properties, this paper shows how the technique of validation obligations enables us to also reason about security concerns through an example from the medical domain.

cs.LO↗
arXiv2021

Do Communities in Developer Interaction Networks align with Subsystem Developer Teams? An Empirical Study of Open Source Systems

Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing to open source software systems tend to self-organize in "emerging" communities. This latent community structure has a significant impact on software quality. While several approaches address the analysis of developer interaction networks, the question of whether these emerging communities align with the developer teams working on various subsystems remains unanswered. Work on socio-technical congruence implies that people that work on the same task or artifact need to coordinate and thus communicate, potentially forming stronger interaction ties. Our empirical study of 10 open source projects revealed that developer communities change considerably across a project's lifetime (hence implying that relevant relations between developers change) and that their alignment with subsystem developer teams is mostly low. However, subsystems teams tend to remain more stable. These insights are useful for practitioners and researchers to better understand developer interaction structure of open source systems.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2021

Team-oriented Consistency Checking of Heterogeneous Engineering Artifacts

Consistency checking of interdependent heterogeneous engineering artifacts, such as requirements, specifications, and code, is a challenging task in large-scale engineering projects. The lack of team-oriented solutions allowing a multitude of project stakeholders to collaborate in a consistent manner is thus becoming a critical problem. In this context, this work proposes an approach for team-oriented consistency checking of collaboratively developed heterogeneous engineering artifacts.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2021

TaskAllocator: A Recommendation Approach for Role-based Tasks Allocation in Agile Software Development

In this paper, we propose a recommendation approach -- TaskAllocator -- in order to predict the assignment of incoming tasks to potential befitting roles. The proposed approach, identifying team roles rather than individual persons, allows project managers to perform better tasks allocation in case the individual developers are over-utilized or moved on to different roles/projects. We evaluated our approach on ten agile case study projects obtained from the Taiga.io repository. In order to determine the TaskAllocator's performance, we have conducted a benchmark study by comparing it with contemporary machine learning models. The applicability of the TaskAllocator was assessed through a plugin that can be integrated with JIRA and provides recommendations about suitable roles whenever a new task is added to the project. Lastly, the source code of the plugin and the dataset employed have been made public.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2021

Validation Obligations: A Novel Approach to Check Compliance between Requirements and their Formal Specification

Traditionally, practitioners use formal methods pre-dominately for one half of the quality-assurance process: verification (do we build the software right?). The other half -- validation (do we build the right software?) -- has been given comparatively little attention. While verification is the core of refinement-based formal methods, where each new refinement step must preserve all properties of its abstract model, validation is usually postponed until the latest stages of the development, when models can be automatically executed. Thus mistakes in requirements or in their interpretation are caught too late: usually at the end of the development process. In this paper, we present a novel approach to check compliance between requirements and their formal refinement-based specification during the earlier stages of development. Our proposed approach -- "validation obligations" -- is based on the simple idea that both verification and validation are an integral part of all refinement steps of a system.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2020

Machine Learning for Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping

Context: The software development industry is rapidly adopting machine learning for transitioning modern day software systems towards highly intelligent and self-learning systems. However, the full potential of machine learning for improving the software engineering life cycle itself is yet to be discovered, i.e., up to what extent machine learning can help reducing the effort/complexity of software engineering and improving the quality of resulting software systems. To date, no comprehensive study exists that explores the current state-of-the-art on the adoption of machine learning across software engineering life cycle stages. Objective: This article addresses the aforementioned problem and aims to present a state-of-the-art on the growing number of uses of machine learning in software engineering. Method: We conduct a systematic mapping study on applications of machine learning to software engineering following the standard guidelines and principles of empirical software engineering. Results: This study introduces a machine learning for software engineering (MLSE) taxonomy classifying the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques according to their applicability to various software engineering life cycle stages. Overall, 227 articles were rigorously selected and analyzed as a result of this study. Conclusion: From the selected articles, we explore a variety of aspects that should be helpful to academics and practitioners alike in understanding the potential of adopting machine learning techniques during software engineering projects.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2020

Model-driven Engineering of Safety and Security Systems: A Systematic Mapping Study

This paper presents a systematic mapping study on the model-driven engineering of safety and security concerns in systems. Integrated modeling and development of both safety and security concerns is an emerging field of research. Our mapping study provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art in this field. Through a rigorous and systematic process, this study carefully selected 95 publications out of 17,927 relevant papers published between 1992 and 2018. This paper then proposes and answers several relevant research questions about frequently used methods, development stages where these concerns are typically investigated in, or application domains. Additionally, we identify the community's preference for publication venues and trends.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2018

Addressing Client Needs for Cloud Computing using Formal Foundations

Cloud-enabled large-scale distributed systems orchestrate resources and services from various providers in order to deliver high-quality software solutions to the end users. The space and structure created by such technological advancements are immense sources of information and impose a high complexity and heterogeneity, which might lead to unexpected failures. In this chapter, we present a model that coordinates the multi-cloud interaction through the specification, validation, and verification of a middle-ware exploiting monitoring and adaptation processes. The monitoring processes handle collecting meaningful data and assessing the state of components, while the adaptation processes restore the system as dictated by the evolution needs and sudden changes in the operating environment conditions. We employ Abstract State Machines to specify the models and we further make use of the ASMETA framework to simulate and validate them. Desired properties of the system are defined and analysed with the aid of the Computation Tree Logic.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2017

Model-Driven Development of High-Assurance Active Medical Devices

Advanced medical devices exploit the advantages of embedded software whose development is subject to compliance with stringent requirements of standardization and certification regimes due to the critical nature of such systems. This paper presents initial results and lessons learned from an ongoing project focusing on the development of a formal model of a subsystem of a software-controlled safety-critical Active Medical Device (AMD) responsible for renal replacement therapy. The use of formal approaches for the development of AMDs is highly recommended by standards and regulations, and motivates the recent advancement of the state of the art of related methods and tools including Event-B and Rodin applied in this paper. It is expected that the presented model development approach and the specification of a high-confidence medical system will contribute to the still sparse experience base available at the disposal of the scientific and practitioner community of formal methods and software engineering.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2017

Towards the Trustworthy Development of Active Medical Devices: A Hemodialysis Case Study

The use of embedded software is advancing in modern medical devices, so does its capabilities and complexity. This paradigm shift brings many challenges such as an increased rate of medical device failures due to software faults. In this letter, we present a rigorous correct by construction approach for the trustworthy development of hemodialysis machines, a sub-class of active medical devices. We show how informal requirements of hemodialysis machines are modeled and analyzed through a rigorous process and suggest a generalization to a larger class of active medical devices.

cs.SE↗