Mining API Specifications from Source Code for Improving Software Reliability

Finally, we conduct an empirical analysis of the characteristics of API specifications in practice such as the distance of pre/postcondition enforcement points in a program to their corresponding call sites and the extent of aliasing between these points and call sites (involving API input parameters and return values) in large open-source packages. These characteristics, as we demonstrate, have implications on the cost and precision of the inter-procedural and alias analysis required for specification mining and violation detection algorithms, and hence, on the scalability and the false-positive rate of the algorithms.