QW2002 Paper 3V2

Dr. Ira Baxter
(Semantic Designs, Inc.)

DMS: Software Quality Enhancement via Automated Software Analysis, Modification and Generation

Presentation Abstract

Most software engineering quality tools are analysis-centric point-solutions: they provide one kind of very specific specific analysis. If you can't find what your company needs off the shelf, however, building a custom tool is almost impossibly expensive. What is really needed is an available, agile cost-effect technology for not only doing custom analyses, but coupling those analyses to mechanically reliable change processes to effect improvements suggested by the analyses.

This talk will describe DMS, a customizable analysis and modification engine that can automatically analyze and change large scale software systems. We will show how the undelying technology works and can be used to read and transforms programs written in arbitrary langauges. We will provide a number of interesting production application examples, including removal of preprocessor directives, XML parser generation, duplicate code detection, and automated translation of one programming language to another.

About the Author

Dr. Baxter has been building systems software for over 30 years. He is presently the Chief Technology Officer of Semantic Designs, a software-tools building company. He is also active in academic conferences, and is presently the Program CoChair for the International Conference on Software Maintence 2002 (Montreal).