In contract-based development of model transformations, continuous deductive verification helps the transformation developer in early bug detection. However, because of the execution performance of current verification systems, re-verifying from scratch after a change has been made would introduce impractical delays. We address this problem by proposing a fine-grained incremental verification approach and applying it to the ATL model-transformation language. Our approach is based on decomposing each contract into sub-goals, and caching the sub-goal verification results. At each change we exploit the semantics of relational model transformation to determine whether a cached verification result may be impacted. Consequently, less postconditions/sub-goals need to be re-verified. When a change forces the re-verification of a postcondition, we use the cached verification results of sub-goals to construct a simplified version of the postcondition to verify. We prove the soundness of our approach and show its effectiveness by continuous and extensive evaluations.

Interest in VeriATL, but do not have time to install? Worry not! Quick demo of VeriATL on youtube:

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Our tool is built on top of a state-of-the-art incremental verification tool Boogie for imperative languages cite. Through evaluation, we show that:

• Our tool speeds up re-verifications by at least 70%.
• Because of using fine-grained verification (notably enabling program slicing and impact analysis), our tool is consistently faster than the state-of-the-art incremental verification tool by 16% to 45%.
• Using fine-grained verification allows our tool to scale to verify large model transformations.

• Please check out the Experiment Branch of this project for how to reproduce the evaluation.

• EMFTVM v.4.0
• Xtend v.2.15

1. Download latest update site of VeriATL from Github Release.
2. In Eclipse, goto Help -> Install New Software -> Add -> Archive -> Choosing the download archive -> Select VeriATL from Category -> Finish.

Zheng Cheng: [email protected]

Massimo Tisi: [email protected]

• Rosemary Monahan, Maynooth Univerisity, IE
• James F. Power, Maynooth Univerisity, IE