Towards a taxonomy of dynamic invariants in software behaviour

The use of dynamic invariants to describe software behaviour has gained increasing popularity and various tools and techniques for mining and using these invariants have been published. Typically, these invariants are used to support various software engineering tasks, such as testing and debugging, which require one to understand and be able to reason about the system behaviour in terms of these invariants. However, the existing works are generally focused on a specific set of invariants for a specific purpose. In many cases it is also useful to view these in a wider context to enable a wider understanding of the invariants and to provide more extensive support across different domains. This paper presents work towards a general taxonomy describing the properties of dynamic invariants based on a review of existing work in their use, providing a basis for a wider adoption of different invariant features in different domains.