Mining Parametric State-Based Specifications from Executions

This paper presents an approach to mine parametric state-based specifications from execution traces, which can involve multiple components. We first discuss a general framework for mining parametric properties from execution traces, which allows one to apply non-parametric mining algorithms to infer parametric specifications without any modification. Then we propose a novel mining algorithm that extends the Probabilistic Finite State Automata (PFSA) approach to infer finite automata that describe system be-haviors concisely and precisely from successful executions. The presented technique has been implemented in a proto-type tool for Java, called jMiner, which has been applied to a number of real-life programs, including Java library classes and popular open source packages. Our exper-iments generated many meaningful specifications and re-vealed problematic behaviors in some programs, showing the effectiveness of our approach.