Specification Mining Based on the Ordering Points to Identify the Clustering Structure Clustering Algorithm and Model Checking

Abstract

Software specifications are of great importance to improve the quality of software. To automatically mine specifications from software systems, some specification mining approaches based on finite-state automatons have been proposed. However, these approaches are inaccurate when dealing with large-scale systems. In order to improve the accuracy of mined specifications, we propose a specification mining approach based on the ordering points to identify the clustering structure clustering algorithm and model checking. In the approach, the neural network model is first used to produce the feature values of states in the traces of the program. Then, according to the feature values, finite-state automatons are generated based on the ordering points to identify the clustering structure clustering algorithm. Further, the finite-state automaton with the highest F-measure is selected. To improve the quality of the finite-state automatons, we refine it based on model checking. The proposed approach was implemented in a tool named MCLSM and experiments, including 13 target classes, were conducted to evaluate its effectiveness. The experimental results show that the average F-measure of finite-state automatons generated by our method reaches 92.19%, which is higher than most related tools.