System For Inspection And Quality Assurance Of Software: A Knowledge-Based Experiment With Code Understanding
Bikas K. Das · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1989
This paper describes a knowledge-based prototype that inspects and quality assures software components. The prototype model, which offers a singular representation of these components, is used to automate both the mechanical and nonmechanical activities in the quality assurance (QA) process. It will be shown that the prototype, in addition to automating the QA process, provides a novel approach to understanding code. Our approaches are compared with recent approaches to code understanding. The paper also presents the results of an experiment with several classes of nonsyntactic bugs. It is argued that a structured environment, as facilitated by our unique architecture along with "software development standards" used in the QA process, is essential for meaningful analysis of code. Initial success with the prototype has generated several interesting directions for future work.