Integrating Systematic exploration, analysis, and maintenance in software development

Abstract

Modern integrated development environments (IDEs) support one live codebase at a given moment, which imposes limitations to software development. For example, with only one codebase, the developer must pause development while running tests, or a static analysis, as any edit could invalidate the ongoing computation. Were the IDEs supported a copy of developer's codebase, the analyses could have run on this copy, in parallel with the development process. In this paper, we propose techniques and tools that integrate multiple live codebases support to the software development process. Our hypothesis is that IDE support for multiple live codebases can provide a richer development process and aid developers.