Specification Mining
Seminar – WS 2011/12

About this Seminar

Place and Time

Important Dates

• Daikon Hand-In, Question 1: Until Wednesday, November 30, 17:00.
  Send a PDF with your answers by mail to specmine2011@st.cs.uni-saarland.de, include your student id.

• Daikon Hand-In, Question 2–4: Until Friday, December 30, 17:00.
  Send a PDF with your answers by mail to specmine2011@st.cs.uni-saarland.de, include your student id.

• End-term presentation: Saturday, March 17, 9:30 – ca. 5:30 pm: Building E1.1, Room 4.07
  • In this session every student is going to hold a formal presentation (25 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A, with slides) on their topic. There will be pizza involved. Material to help you give a good talk:
    • Andreas Zeller's slides on how to give a good research talk.
    • Presentation zen: simple ideas on presentation design and delivery (Garr Reynolds, eBook available at the library)
    • The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs: how to be insanely great in front of any audience (Carmine Gallo, available at the library)
    • Don't make them think: creating the best flow for the elements of any great presentation (Jerry Weissman, eBook available at the library)
    • Less is more: the proper use of graphics for effective presentations (Jerry Weissman, eBook available at the library)
  • You will need to hand in an annotated version of your slides (with comments in your slideset) after your presentation.
  • This will count as your final write-up. It should be self-contained enough to tell the full story behind your topic.

Schedule for Saturday, March 17

1. 9:30 – 10:00: Introduction to Specification Mining:
   • Based on Chapter 1 of the book, written by David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu, and Jiawei Han
   • Assigned to: Mehdi
2. 10:00 – 10:30: Mining annotated Finite-State Automatons:
   • Based on Chapter 2 of the book, written by Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore, Mauro Pezzè, and Mauro Santoro
   • Assigned to: Oliver
3. 10:30 – 11:00: Dynamically Discovering Program Invariants (Daikon):
   • Based on the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering article published in 2001
   • Authors: Michael D. Ernst, Jake Cockrell, William G. Griswold, and David Notkin
   • Assigned to: Mathias
30 minute break
4. 11:30 – 12:00: Grammar Inference Technique for State Machine Mining:
   • Based on Chapter 3 of the book, written by Neil Walkinshaw and Kirill Bogdanov
   • Assigned to: Evica
5. 12:00 – 12:30: Mining API Usage Protocols from Large Method Traces:
   • Based on Chapter 4 of the book, written by Michael Pradel and Thomas R. Gross
   • Assigned to: Krishna
6. 12:30 – 13:00: Generating Test Cases for Specification Mining (Tautoko):
   • Based on the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis paper published in 2010
   • Authors: Valentin Dallmeier, Nikolai Knopp, Christoph Mallon, Sebastian Hack, and Andreas Zeller
   • Assigned to: Joachim
60 minute break with pizza
7. 14:00 – 14:30: Static API Specification Mining and Source Code Model Checking:
   • Based on Chapter 5 of the book, written by Mithun Acharya and Tao Xie
   • Assigned to: Daniil
8. 14:30 – 15:00: Finding Usage Patterns and Their Violations by Mining Software Repositories (DynaMine):
   • Based on Chapter 7 of the book, written by Benjamin Livshits and Thomas Zimmermann
   • Assigned to: Andreas
9. 15:00 – 15:30: Automatic Inference and Effective Application of Temporal Specifications:
   • Based on Chapter 8 of the book, written by Jinlin Yang and David Evans
   • Assigned to: Karsten
30 minute break
10. 16:00 – 16:30: Specification Inference for Explicit Information Flow Problems (Merlin):
    • Based on Chapter 11 of the book, written by Benjamin Livshits, Aditya V. Nori, Sriram K. Rajamani, and Anindya Banerjee
    • Assigned to: Marie-Therese
11. 16:30 – 17:00: Lightweight Mining of Object Usage:
    • Based on Chapter 12 of the book, written by Andrzej Wasylkowski and Andreas Zeller
    • Assigned to: Mykola
12. 17:00 – 17:30: Mining temporal specifications from object usage:
    • Based on the Automated Software Engineering conference paper published in 2009
    • Authors: Andrzej Wasylkowsk and Andreas Zeller
    • Assigned to: Maximilian

Requirements for successful participation

• Important: You can only take part in this seminar after you have successfully registered for it. Registration is now closed.
• Prerequisites: This seminar is suitable for all students, bachelor's or master's, who are interested in software engineering and its applications. You don't need to have any prior knowledge regarding the subject, however participation in any other course offered by the Software Engineering chair might be useful.
• Hands-on project: Daikon
  • We have prepared a hands-on project for you to familiarize yourself with the Daikon tool.
  • You will need to hand-in answers to questions. More information is available here.
• For each meeting:
  • Hand in a summary until Sunday, 17:00 before each meeting. Send a PDF by mail to specmine2011@st.cs.uni-saarland.de, include your student id.
  • Your summary should give a good overview of the material that will be discussed in the following session. It is intended to show us that you familiarized yourself with the material.
  • You should also include ~3 questions on the material to prepare yourself for the discussion.
  • On each session we will ask one student to kick-start the discussion based on their summary (~5 minutes). This is an opportunity for you to get early feedback on your presentation style.
  • We also offer (ungraded) opportunities to present your summary in form of a five-minute presentation, allowing you to get early feedback on your presentation style.
• End-term presentation (see above)
• Grading: Your final grade will consist of the following components:
  • 40 % based on your final presentation
  • 20 % based on the annotated slides
  • 40 % based on participation in discussions / handed-in summaries / hands-on projects

HISPOS

Please remember to register yourself in the HISPOS system. We can only provide you with a certificate ("Schein") at the end of the term, if you have registered for our seminar in the HISPOS system. Information on how to register is available here.

Advisors

• Andreas Zeller
• Gordon Fraser
• Florian Gross