Effective Bug Hunting with SPIN and Modex

This tutorial consists of two parts. In the first part we present an advanced overview of SPIN, and illustrate its practical application to logic model checking problems. In the second part of the tutorial we present an overview of a related tool called Modex. Modex can be used to extract Spin verification models directly from C source code. It supports the definition of user-defined abstractions, and cleverly exploits the capability in Spin version 4 to include embedded C code inside abstract verification models. We will show how to use Spin and Modex, separately and combined, in an effective way when searching for design errors in distributed software applications. Both Spin and Modex are written in ANSI-C and can freely be used on research projects