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Software Evolution

Computer scientists have traditionally considered the program source as a static entity and the program's behavior as dynamic. In fact, the program source has never been static, constantly evolving in response to errors and changing requirements. The easy availability of multiple versions of a program through the agency of public version-control repositories has enabled an exciting new branch of program analysis: the treatment of the program source as a dynamic entity. One of our projects analyzed the source to find the impact of each program relative to the program's decomposition by feature. In addition, our work on XACML policy analysis also treats the access control specification as an evolving entity, providing support for studying this evolution through change impact analysis. These efforts take a much more archaeological approach to program growth than my older work on black-box extensibility.

Project status: Active

Publications

Fisler, K., Krishnamurthi, S., Meyerovich, L. A., and Tschantz, M. C. Verification and Change-Impact Analysis of Access-Control Policies. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (May 2005), pp. 196-205. [ home ]

Licata, D. R., Harris, C. D., and Krishnamurthi, S. The Feature Signatures of Evolving Programs. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Automated Software Engineering (Oct. 2003), pp. 281-285. [ home ]

Flatt, M., Krishnamurthi, S., and Felleisen, M. A Programmer's Reduction Semantics for Classes and Mixins. In Formal Syntax and Semantics of Java, J. Alves-Foss, Ed. Springer-Verlag, 1999, pp. 241-269.

Krishnamurthi, S., and Felleisen, M. Toward a Formal Theory of Extensible Software. In Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (Nov. 1998), pp. 88-98. [ home ]

Krishnamurthi, S., Felleisen, M., and Friedman, D. P. Synthesizing Object-Oriented and Functional Design to Promote Re-Use. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (July 1998), pp. 91-113. [ home ]

Flatt, M., Krishnamurthi, S., and Felleisen, M. Classes and Mixins. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (Jan. 1998), pp. 171-183. [ home ]