Accession Number:

ADA581476

Title:

Mining Program Source Code for Improving Software Quality

Descriptive Note:

Final rept. 8 Sep 2008-7 Sep 2012

Corporate Author:

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIV AT RALEIGH

Personal Author(s):

• Xie, Tao

Report Date:

2013-01-01

Pagination or Media Count:

13.0

Abstract:

While the last decade has witnessed great advances in assuring high software quality through static verification against software hazards and unexpected behavior, the field has pretty much focused on statically verifying software applications against common properties to detect common programming problems such as incorrect usage of memory pointers. But most quality issues such as correctness, security, and robustness violations are caused by the incorrect usage of application programming interfaces APIs. Although API properties or behaviors can be formally specified and statically verified against software applications by the current state-of-the-art static verification tools, these API properties or behaviors are often not documented by the developers, partly due to two major hindrances in practice manually specifying a large number of properties or behaviors for static verification is often 1 inaccurate or incomplete, and 2 cumbersome and prohibitively expensive. This project develops new approaches that mine program source code for API properties, which are used to conduct static verification on the software application under analysis to detect defects around APIs.

Descriptors:

• *COMPUTER PROGRAM VERIFICATION
• COMPUTER PROGRAMMING
• COMPUTER SECURITY

Subject Categories:

• Computer Programming and Software

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE