JavaPDG: A New Platform for Program Dependence Analysis

Abstract

Dependence analysis is a fundamental technique for program understanding and is widely used in software testing and debugging. However, there are a limited number of analysis tools available despite a wide range of research work in this field. In this paper, we present JavaPDG1, a static analyzer for Java bytecode, which is capable of producing various graphical representations such as the system dependence graph, procedure dependence graph, control flow graph and call graph. As a program-dependence-graph based analyzer, JavaPDG performs both intra- and inter-procedural dependence analysis, and enables researchers to apply a wide range of program analysis techniques that rely on dependence analysis. JavaPDG provides a graphical viewer to browse and analyze the various graphs and a convenient JSON based serialization format.