Wheels: An Automated Program Analysis Tool.
Aggie Yee-Chun Sun, Bruce McMillin · 1996
The understanding of program behavior is becoming vitally more important now that software is becoming an integral part of industry and everyday life. However, even the best documented code is often not sufficient enough to completely and correctly relay the actual program behavior. The problem lies beyond being familiar with the programming language and is hidden in the complex mathematics which govern the program's behavior. This behavior is not easily detected and varies from one program to the next. We propose a method for describing program behavior using two general properties of iterative programs: feasibility and progress. This method can be easily applied to trivial and simple code but an automated tool is required to generate the properties for more realistic code. Therefore, an automated program visualization tool was developed to illustrate the program's behavior in terms of the two properties proposed. Wheels take as input program code, reverse engineers the behavior by an...