2026-06-06

A Survey on Automatic Assertion Miners - References

imanSurveyAutomaticAssertion2025 cite 4 papers as reference for assertions are hard.

1. heidariimanEnhancingAssertionBasedVerification2024, their own thesis
2. bouleGeneratingHardwareAssertion2008
3. 31 is ArtMine, another one of their own papers
4. feyRobustnessUsabilityModern2008

bouleGeneratingHardwareAssertion2008 and feyRobustnessUsabilityModern2008 are both books and they have passages indicating the arduousness of writing assertions.

Looking at their thesis, they cited the following

• bouleGeneratingHardwareAssertion2008
  • This is about completeness
• jenihhinReusabilityVerificationAssertions2008, same university
  • says that deep knowledge is required
• 60 Ngo et. al
  • Hardware Property checker, I wasn’t about to find anything about assertions being hard. They used assertions as way to detect hardware trojans
• feyRobustnessUsabilityModern2008
  • Book, explicitly states that assertions are hard
• katzHaveWrittenEnough1999
  • This too deals with completeness. There is no mention of assertions being hard

Out of all these I felt that only feyRobustnessUsabilityModern2008 had the fact explicitly stated. The other references were a stretch.

germinianiHARMHintBasedAssertion2022 cites a paper that talks about software assertions. They have a line

Specifying proper assertions appears to require ingenuity

And they cite a survey paper of java source code analysis and how few assert statements are in them.

So not really a good reference.