October 9, 2008 20:9 WSPC/INSTRUCTION FILE C691 International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering c  World Scientiﬁc Publishing Company A REVIEW APPROACH TO DETECTING VIOLATIONS OF CONSISTENCY BETWEEN SPECIFICATION AND PROGRAM STRUCTURES * YUTING CHEN 1,2,3 and SHAOYING LIU 1 1. Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences, Hosei University Tokyo, 184-8584, Japan 2. Computer Science & Engineering Department, Shanghai Jiaotong University Shanghai, 200240, P.R.China 3. State Key Lab. for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, P.R.China chenyt@cs.sjtu.edu.cn, sliu@hosei.ac.jp W. ERIC WONG Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas Dallas, TX 75080, USA ewong@utdallas.edu Received (1 Sept 2006) Revised (1 June 2007) Accepted (20 Aug 2007) The application of speciﬁcation-based program veriﬁcation techniques (e.g., black-box testing, formal proof) faces strong challenges in practice when the gap between the structure of a speciﬁcation and that of its program is large. This paper describes a view- based program review approach to addressing these challenges. The essential idea of the approach is ﬁrst to derive comparable views from the speciﬁcation and program, and then detect and eliminate the violations of structural consistency in the program views on the basis of a set of criteria. We also developed a prototype tool to support the review approach, and conducted a case study to assess the eﬀectiveness of the approach. Keywords : Program review; view; structural consistency; SOFL speciﬁcation; software structure. 1. Introduction Speciﬁcation-based program veriﬁcation techniques, such as black-box testing [1], program review [2], and formal proofs [3], have drawn great attention from the re- search community over the last thirty years, but all of them face strong challenges ∗ This work is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan under Grant-in-Aid for Scientiﬁc Research (No.18500027). The Role of Shaoying Liu in this research is supported by the NSFC Grant (No. 60433010), and Yuting Chen is also supported by State Key Lab. for Novel Software Technology (No. KFKT2008B05). 1