Abstraction and Automation for Reasoning about Complex Software

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Modern software development is a complex and messy business. Requirements are likely incomplete. New development uses complex existing libraries, tools and components that can fail. Multiple development teams proceed on different schedules, making it difficult to assure that their artifacts will "talk to each other" as intended. Every time a change is made, expensive quality assurance needs to be performed to ensure that software still does what it was supposed to. Such problems are made even more dire because many companies, especially in automotive, electronics, aerospace and defense domains, need to maintain families of software product variants with similar yet not identical functionality (e.g., supporting different types of customers and/or software platforms).    I believe that many of the above problems can be aided by the availability of industrially scalable automated reasoning and analysis tools that enable users to answer essential questions about their artifacts. For example, they can determine the impact of a proposed change, ask "what if" questions about their designs, determine whether the different features are going to interact, check whether desired properties of a component would hold in any environment, etc. Creating such tools requires expertise both in formal verification and in software engineering, as many of the challenges are in improving usability of the analysis tools for SE practitioners, performing analysis at the "right" level of abstraction, enabling analysis earlier in the development lifecycle where complete information is not yet available, reusing results of analysis between product variants, etc.    The goal of this project is to develop precise, effective and scalable automated techniques to solve a variety of complex software engineering problems. The emphasis will be on enabling analysis of artifacts with incomplete information, handling product lines, and analysis reuse. I intend to leverage my in-depth knowledge of verification tools such as model-checkers and static analyzers as well as strive to establish the right abstractions to facilitate reasoning. Success of this project will significantly expand the scope of applicability of automated reasoning and analysis in practice.