Integration of generic program analysis tools into a software development environment

ABSTRACT

Support for program understanding in development and maintenance tasks can be facilitated by program analysis techniques. Both control-flow and data-flow analysis can support program comprehension by augmenting the program text with additional information that may either be displayed with the program or used to allow more sophisticated navigation of the program, e.g., from an identifier's use to its definition.This paper outlines the addition of generic program analysis support to a generic, language-based, software development environment. The analysis tools are implemented in two phases: a language-dependent phase that extracts basic information from a program, such as its control flow graph; and a language-independent phase that performs a more sophisticated analysis of the basic information. This separation allows program analysis tools to be easily generated for a new language.

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Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Designing software

      • Software implementation planning

        • Software design techniques

    • Software development process management

      • Software development methods

  • Software notations and tools

    • Development frameworks and environments

      • Integrated and visual development environments