QUARK: Empirical assessment of automaton-based specification miners

Software is often built without specification. Tools to automatically extract specification from software are needed and many techniques have been proposed. One type of these specifications - temporal API specification - is often specified in the form of automaton. There has been much work on reverse engineering or mining software temporal specification, using dynamic analysis techniques; i.e., analysis of software program traces. Unfortunately, the issues of scalability, robustness and accuracy of these techniques have not been comprehensively addressed. In this paper, we describe QUARK(QUality Assurance framewoRK) that enables assessments of the performance of a specification miner in generating temporal specification of software through traces recorded from its API interaction. QUARK requires the temporal specification produced by the miner to be expressed as an automaton. It accepts a user-defined simulator automaton and a specification miner. It produces quality assurance measures on the specification generated by the miner. Extensive experiments on 3 specification miners have been performed to demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed framework. © 2006 IEEE.