Program Analysis on Evolving Software

Daniel Kästner (1) , Jan Pohland (1)

1 Angewandte Informatik - AbsInt GmbH

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.

Domaines: Systèmes embarqués

Daniel Kästner, Jan Pohland. Program Analysis on Evolving Software. CARS 2015 - Critical Automotive applications: Robustness & Safety, Sep 2015, Paris, France. ⟨hal-01192985⟩