Experimental program analysis: a new paradigm for program analysis

Abstract

Program analysis techniques are used by software engineers to deduce and infer targeted characteristics of software systems for tasks such as testing, debugging, maintenance, and program comprehension. Recently, some program analysis techniques have been designed to leverage characteristics of traditional experimentation in order to analyze software systems. We believe that the use of experimentation for program analysis constitutes a new program analysis paradigm: experimental program analysis. This research seeks to accomplish four goals: to precisely define experimental program analysis, to provide a means for classifying experimental program analysis techniques, to identify existing experimental program analysis techniques in the research literature, and to enhance the use of experimental program analysis by improving existing, and by creating new, experimental program analysis techniques.