Towards Software Analysis as a Service

Towards Software Analysis as a Service

inproceedings
Harald C. Gall, Giacomo Ghezzi
Throughout the years software engineers have come up with a myriad of specialized tools and techniques that focus on a certain type of analysis, such as metrics extraction, evolution tracking, co-change detection, bug prediction, all the way up to social network analysis of team dynamics. However, easy and straight forward synergies between these analyses/tools rarely exist because of their stand-alone nature, their platform dependence, their different input and output formats and the variety of systems to analyze. This significantly hampers their usage and reduces their acceptance by other researchers and software companies. To overcome this problem we propose a distributed and collaborative software analysis platform to enable a seamless interoperability of software analysis tools across platform, geographical and organizational boundaries. In particular, we devise software analysis tools as services that can be accessed and composed over the Internet. These distributed services shall be widely accessible through a software analysis broker where organizations and research groups can register and share their tools. To enable (semi)-automatic use and composition of these tools, they are classified and mapped into a software analysis taxonomy and adhere to specific meta-models and ontologies for their category of analysis.
Towards Software Analysis as a Service
2008
IEEE Computer Society
10 (to appear)
L'Aquila, Italy
September
Proceedings of Evol'08, the 4th Intl. ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution and Evolvability at the 23rd IEEE/ACM Intl. Conf. on Automated Software Engineering
s.e.a.l.