Understanding and improving OO software through static software analysis

Warwick Irwin, PhD Student

Dept. CSSE, University of Canterbury

Fri Jun 22 09:30:00 NZST 2007 in Room 031, Erskine Building

Abstract

This talk presents a new approach to a long-standing problem faced by developers of software engineering tools: how to extract accurate information from source code. Existing technology tends to encourage ad hoc and imprecise static analysis, and is labour-intensive. We take a fresh look at applying bottom-up parsing theory to this problem, and achieve significant gains over current practices. We show how our new parsing technology underpins a semantic model that exposes the structure of Java programs, enabling the construction of tools intended to help software engineers understand and develop software.