Software Inspection Using CodeSurfer

Software Inspection is a technique for detecting flaws in software before deployment. It was introduced by Fagan in 1976 [12], and since then its use has spread widely. Despite the widespread adoption and success of software inspection, many software products continue to be released with large numbers of flaws. This can partly be attributed to the inherent complexity of software systems. The complexity of the software thwarts manual attempts to comprehend it. Furthermore, the ideal situation for conducting software inspections in the field may often not be feasible. Time, geographical, or other constraints may mean that the original author of the code is not available to explain the structure of the code or describe its intended properties. Documentation may be misleading or even missing. General-purpose program understanding tools are crucial if code is to be inspected efficiently. However such tools until now have mostly operated on the surface-level syntactic features of the code. Yet another difficulty is raised by the fact that safety or secuiry requirements of software may be extremely difficult to show using manual techniques. For example, regulatory authorities that specify standards for safety-critical programs such as the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) or the Nuclear Regulatory Commision (NRC) sometimes require that programs involved in the control of components have specific properties such as “part A must be independent of part B”. It is a difficult and error-prone process for a human to determine whether these properties hold for a program. We believe that tools that allow reasoning about the deep structure of the code at a high level of detail will be extremely useful for doing software inspections. In this paper we describe how our own system—CodeSurfer—provides access to and queries on the system-dependence graph representation of a program for the purposes of helping with software inspections. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section II presents some basic material on dependence graphs. Section III describes CodeSurfer—our system for program understanding. Section IV describes how queries on the system dependence dependence graph can be used for software inspection. Section V describes using model checking

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