Verification, Testing and Statistics

Programming tools have expanded both ill scope of the problems they solve, and in the kinds of techniques they use. Traditionally, programming tools have focused on detecting errors in programs. Recently; this scope has broadened to help with other programming tasks, including inferring specifications, helping diagnose root cause of errors during debugging, and managing knowledge in large projects. Also, traditionally programming tools have been based on either static or dynamic program analysis. Modern programming tools combine static and dynamic program analysis together with techniques from other disciplines such as statistical and probabilistic inference, and information retrieval. This paper reports on some such tools built by the Rigorous Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research India.