A knowledge-based approach to automatic program analysis

Abstract

Software maintenance is the most expensive part of the software life-cycle. This is partially due to the fact that quite often the only reliable and available documentation about a program is its source code and all the relevant information must be extracted from it. This thesis research proposes a knowledge-based approach for automating the analysis of program source code. A prototype program analysis tool, called PAT, has been constructed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. In PAT, we represent the program information as events and the program analysis knowledge as plans. Both events and plans are organized into a classification hierarchy based on the programming concepts that they express. The understanding of a program is implemented as an inference process in which new events (representing high-level programming concepts) are derived from the existing ones using plans. Plans also contain information for the documentation and debugging of the derived events. A justification-based truth maintenance system is used to record and maintain the facts derived from the programs and their justifications.