Program Analysis on Evolving Software
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Static analysis is well-suited for continuous verification during the software development stage since it only works on the source code and does not require a running system for testing. However, applying the program analysis during software development means that the analysis has to cope with evolving software and evolving analyzer configurations, especially in a model-based development process. In this article we present a unique history-aware concept for program analysis that has been developed for the static analyzer Astrée. It not only provides the ability to backtrack and access previous versions of the analysis configuration, it can also automatically determine the differences between two analysis configurations and relate them to the correct source code versions. Users can explicitly create a revision, i.e. a snapshot of the analysis project; changes of the source code, analysis options, analysis directives and results in different revisions are automatically detected and highlighted. The analyzer provides automatic correctness checks for all specified analysis directives, e.g., to tune the precision of the analyzer or provide information about the environment. This makes software verification applicable during the implementation stage, significantly reduces the effort to adapt the analyzer configuration to new source code versions, and makes analysis results on previous software versions easily reproducible.
Source: HAL
Authors: Daniel L. Kastner, Jan Pohland
Institution: AbsInt (Germany)
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2400035429