METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR IDENTIFYING RELEVANT CHANGES FOR INCREMENTAL VERIFICATION OF EVOLVING SOFTWARE

Modern software verification tools are moving towards incremental verification of program properties to ensure safety of evolving software systems. However, not every change in the program impacts verification outcome of program properties. Moreover, analyzing these irrelevant changes adds to cost of incremental verification. A system and method have been provided for identifying relevant changes for incremental verification of evolving software. The disclosure provides a light-weight pre-analysis phase of identifying relevant changes that can lead to improvement in efficiency of all existing incremental verification techniques. To identify relevant changes, the system provides a relevant change identification technique (RCIT) with respect to program properties. The RCIT uses a variant of the strongly live variables (SLV) analysis to compute variables that are influencing the verification outcome of program properties. These variables are referred as value influencing variables (VIVs). The RCIT, then uses computed VIVs and changed statement information to identify relevant changes.