Integration of generic program analysis tools into a software development environment
Erica Glynn, Ian J. Hayes, Anthony MacDonald · 2005
Support for program understanding in development and maintenance tasks can be facilitated by program analysis techniques. The ow analysis techniques of control- ow and data- ow analysis support program comprehension through the provision of graphical and interactive representations. This paper outlines the addition of program anal-ysis support to a generic language-based environ-ment via the construction of the automatically gener-ated Graph Builder, and hand-crafted generic Analy-sis tool components. These generically implemented tools represent a signicant advancement in inte-grated program understanding support within a soft-ware development environment and the integration of these tools represents a step towards an ideal lan-guage support environment as denitively presented by the Stoneman requirements specication. The realisation of ow analysis support tools for program understanding further requires the devel-opment of new techniques for calculating execution characteristics and modication-use relationships of control- ow graph nodes within the context of a generic environment supporting relational naviga-tion. 1