SIGSOFT

The principal control-flow abstraction mechanism in the Cobol language is the perform statement. Normally, perform statements are used in a straightforward manner to define parameterless procedures (where global variables are used to pass data into and ...

Coverage testing techniques, such as statement and decision coverage, play a significant role in improving the quality of software systems. Constructing a thorough set of tests that yield high coverage, however, is often a very tedious, time consuming ...

The Factored Control Flow Graph, FCFG, is a novel representation of a program's intraprocedural control flow, which is designed to efficiently support the analysis of programs written in languages, such as Java, that have frequently occurring operations ...

The development of a military safety critical system has many facets, one of which is the collecting of evidence that can be used to assist the production of the safety case necessary for certification of a system into military use. Within the ...

Existing methods to handle pointer variables during data-flow analyses can make such analyses inefficient both in time and space because the data-flow analyses must store and propagate large sets of data facts that are introduced by dereferences of ...

Object-oriented program design promotes the reuse of code not only through inheritance and polymorphism, but also through building server classes which can be used by many different client classes. Research on static analysis of object-oriented software ...

Partial order optimization techniques for distributed systems improve the performance of finite state verification approaches by avoiding redundant exploration of some portions of the state space. Previously, such techniques have been applied in the ...

The effectiveness of traditional type checking in C is limited by the presence of type conversions using type casts. Because the C standard allows arbitrary type conversions between pointer types, neither C compilers, nor tools such as lint, can ...

We are currently developing a methodological framework for reverse engineering Fortran77 programs used by Electricité de France, in which the first step is the construction of an algebraic specification which faithfully represents the Fortran ...

We propose a new paradigm to query information about programs, namely query by outlines. This paradigm relies on an outlining model that conceptually describe units of code according to the computations they perform. Outlines are automatically ...

This paper puts forward the Graphical Interactive Diagnosing, Testing and Slicing System (GIDTS) which is a graphical programming environment for PROLOG programs. The IDTSpart of the system integrates Shapiro's Interactive Diagnosis Algorithm with the ...

Many programmers write their programs with a primitive text editor that has no knowledge about the edited text. On the other hand, they use ingenious compilers that collect control flow and data flow information to perform optimizations and generate ...