SHF: Small: Programming with Semantic Revision Requests

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Software development today is a social process, and the workflow ofprogrammers is increasingly centered around discussing programrevisions - that is, artifacts that document small, incremental programchanges. Meanwhile, traditional research on testing, debugging, and analyzingprograms focuses on one program version at a time, ignoring any preceding orsucceeding versions of the same software artifact. The project's noveltiesare a foundational examination of program revisions and the investigation ofautomated techniques that cooperatively assist software-engineering teamswith reasoning about them. The project's impacts are to enhance the wayengineering teams collaboratively evolve their software and thus enable themto more effectively create secure and reliable software on which societydepends.The project's core contribution is defining the notion of a "semanticrevision request" that enables treating program revisions as first-classentities for debugging and analysis tools. A semantic view of programrevisions enables programmers to run or analyze the program revision (bothbefore and after a change simultaneously), not merely each of the two programversions, as supported by today's conventional tools. By focusing ondebugging and analyzing program revisions - not their individual programversions - the resulting tools come closer to capturing the intent of theprogrammer as they develop and commit program changes. The intended broaderimpact from a technical perspective is that these executable and analyzablespecifications will supplement, or even replace, informal descriptions abouthow software systems evolve, by providing an unambiguous way to communicatehigh-level programmer intent.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.