Component Data-Flow Analysis for Large-Software Systems

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9900988 Barbara RyderLarge industrial-sized software systems (of 1 million lines of code) suffer from a lack of adequate testing and program understanding tools, especially when such systems contain heterogeneous components and/or legacy codes. Scalable compile-time analysis techniques are needed to serve as a basis for appropriate software tools which can provide adjustable levels of precision for predictable cost. Analysis results should be obtainable for an arbitrary component (e.g., module) of a system, even if the code for the entire system is not available for inspection. The goal of this research is to explore new analyses applicable to these large industrial systems, emphasizing the issues of scalability and unavailability of full system source code. This will be accomplished by design of a schema for "component data-flow analysis", a scalable data-flow technique which, given some coarse-grained data-flow information about unavailable program components, is able to apply an acceptably precise data-flow analysis on a particular component whose source code is available. The utility of component analysis will be demonstrated by its application to several data-flow problems useful for testing and program understanding, using a prototype implementation built with the PROLANGS Analysis Framework (PAF), a publically available software platform for compile-time program analysis