Towards verification as a service

Abstract

Modern software systems are highly configurable and evolve over time. Simultaneously, they have high demands on their correctness and trustworthiness. Formal verification technique are a means to ensure critical system requirements, but still require a lot of computation power and manual intervention. In this paper, we argue that formal verification processes can be cast as workflows known from business process modeling. Single steps in the verification process constitute verification tasks which can be flexibly combined to verification workflows. The verification tasks can be carried out using designated services which are provided by highly scalable computing platforms, such as cloud computing environments. Verification workflows share the characteristics of business processes such that well-established results and tool support from workflow modeling, management and analysis are directly applicable. System evolution causing re-verification is supported by workflow adaptation techniques such that previously established verification results can be reused. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.