UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- As we increasingly depend on software to manage critical infrastructures in areas such as finance, air traffic control, health, transportation and national defense, it becomes increasingly important for communicating the intended behavior of software systems to software developers and users, and to make it possible for automated tools to verify whether a given piece of software behaves as intended.
According to Vasant Honavar, professor and Edward Frymoyer Chair of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), and director of the Center for Big Data Analytics and Discovery Informatics, producing useful, non-trivial specifications from scratch is difficult, time consuming, and requires expertise that is not broadly available. Therefore, such specifications are largely unavailable. The lack of precise specifications for core libraries and widely used frameworks makes specifying applications that use them even more difficult.
Honavar is part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers that is leading an effort to develop automated or semi-automated methods for inferring the specifications from code, and assisting developers in writing the specifications. The resulting methods and tools combine analytics over large open source code repositories to augment and improve upon specifications by program analysis-based specification inference.
“The absence of precise, comprehensible, and efficiently verifiable specifications is a major hurdle to developing software systems that are reliable, secure, and easy to maintain and reuse,” Honavar said. “This research is aimed at developing methods and tools for specifying the intended behavior of software."
Honavar recently received a grant of $319,511 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the project “Inferring Software Specifications from Open Source Repositories by Leveraging Data and Collective Community Expertise.” The grant is part of an award totaling $1.5 million in partnership with Iowa State University, University of Central Florida, and Bowling Green State University.