Publications

We present a Python library for trace analysis named PyContract. PyContract is a shallow internal DSL, in contrast to many trace analysis tools that implement external or deep internal DSLs. The library has been used in a project for analysis of logs from NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. We describe our design choices, explain the API via examples, and present an experiment comparing PyContract against other state-of-the-art tools from the research and industrial communities.

Software-intensive systems constantly evolve. To prevent software changes from unintentionally introducing costly system defects, it is important to understand their impact to reduce risk. However, it is in practice nearly impossible to foresee the full impact of software changes when dealing with huge industrial systems with many configurations and usage scenarios.

Model learning, learning a state machine from software, can be an effective model-based engineering technique, especially to understand legacy software. However, so far the applicability is limited as models that can be learned are quite small, often insufficient to represent the software behavior of large industrial systems.