Automating traceability for generated software artifacts
Julian Richardson, J. Green · NASA Technical Reports Server (NASA) · 2004
Program synthesis automatically derives programs from specifications of their behavior. One advantage of program synthesis, as opposed to manual coding, is that there is a direct link between the specification and the derived program. This link is, however, not very fine-grained: it can be best characterized as Program is-derivedfrom Specification. When the generated program needs to be understood or modified, more fine-grained linking is useful. In this paper, we present a novel technique for automatically deriving traceability relations between parts of a specification and parts of the synthesized program. The technique is very lightweight and works —- with varying degrees of success — for any process in which one artifact is automatically derived from another. We illustrate the generality of the technique by applying it to two kinds of automatic generation: synthesis of Kalman Filter programs from specifications using the AutoFilter program synthesis system, and generation of assembly language programs from C source code using the GCC C compiler. We evaluate the effectiveness of the technique in the latter application. 1.