Scaling scope bounded checking using incremental approaches

Bounded Verification is an effective technique for finding subtle bugs in object-oriented programs. Given a program, its correctness specification and bounds on the input domain size, scope bounded checking translates bounded code segments into formulas in boolean logic and uses off the shelf satisfiability solvers to search for correctness violations. However, scalability is a key issue of the technique, since for non-trivial programs, the formulas are often complex and can choke the solvers. This thesis describes approaches which aim to scale scope bounded checking by utilizing syntactic and semantic information from the code to split a program into sub-programs which can be checked incrementally. It presents a thorough evaluation of the approaches and compares their performance with existing bounded verification techniques. Novel ideas for future work, specifically a specification slicing driven splitting approach, are proposed to further improve the scalability of bounded verification.