A Program Synthesis Approach for Adding Architectural Tactics to An Existing Code Base

Automatically constructing a program based on given specifications has been studied for decades. Despite the advances in the field of Program Synthesis, the current approaches suffer from a twofold issue: highly relying on the programmer for providing the specifications, and leaving the task of incorporating the synthesized code in an existing code base to program developers. Due to its program-wide effects, synthesizing an architectural tactic and reusing it in a program is even more challenging. Architectural tactics need to be synthesized based on the context of different locations of the program, broken down to smaller pieces, and added to corresponding locations in the code. Moreover, each piece needs to establish correct data- and control-dependencies to its surrounding environment as well as to the other synthesized pieces. This is an error-prone and challenging task, especially for novice program developers. In this paper, we introduce a novel program synthesis approach that synthesizes and adds architectural tactics to an existing code base.