1. In Defense of Soundiness: A Manifesto
- Author
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Livshits, Benjamin, Sridharan, Manu, Smaragdakis, Yannis, Lhoták, Ondřej, Amaral, J. Nelson, Chang, Bor-Yuh Evan, Guyer, Samuel Z., Khedker, Uday P., Møller, Anders, and Vardoulakis, Dimitrios
- Subjects
COMPUTER software quality control ,DEFECT tracking (Computer software development) ,SOFTWARE engineering ,SOFTWARE measurement ,PROGRAMMING languages ,COMPUTER software - Abstract
The article discusses soundness of static program analysis. The authors say soundness implies accounting for all possible executions of a program, the calculation of an over-approximation, and an avoidance of spurious results. In their view no whole-program analysis tool meets this standard, a fact that most members of the research community are unaware of. To address this situation they propose a type of analysis called soundy that is characterized by over-approximation for most features of a programming language, but under-approximation for a specific subset.
- Published
- 2015
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