Collaborative Research: SHF: Core: Medium: Program Synthesis for Schema Changes

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Many programs interact with databases and make assumptions about the underlying data schema. In reality, however, the schema often needs to change (e.g., for performance reasons). As a result, both the underlying data and program code need to be updated to reflect this schema change. This poses significant challenges to developers and is considered to be a tedious and time-consuming aspect of program evolution. This project aims to simplify the schema modification process through the use of program synthesis. The goal of this proposal is to develop synthesis techniques to help developers with different aspects of changing data schemas. In particular, the project will develop new techniques for migrating data between different formats as well as techniques for updating the code that interacts with a modified schema. The project’s novelties are a suite of novel program synthesis techniques that can be used to automatically migrate the data to the desired format and modify any existing code to be consistent with the new schema. The project's impacts are to significantly reduce the manual software engineering effort involved in the schema modification process. The project is introducing undergraduate students from underrepresented groups to computer science research via research internships through programs at both institutions and mentoring workshops at formal methods and programming languages conferences.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.