Code Generation, Analysis and Quality Testing

Dear Colleagues,

Programming is still a mainly manual process. The amount of detail a programmer needs to consider while developing and algorithm can be quite large. To help programmers, there are three main areas of research:

1) Code Generation: The development of tools to generate code based on domai- specific languages. Some good old examples are compiler generators, like flex or yacc. Other more recent tools follow this idea, like Microsoft Entity Framework, or the VDMTools specification language. Nevertheless, there is still room for improvement and automation;

2) Code Analysis: A large amount of code is running on a daily basis on the planet. While some code is quite recent, there is a large amount of legacy software still running. Either to keep legacy software running smoothly, or to help finding bugs in recently developed software, there are tools and companies dedicated to analyzing code, finding its flaws. Unfortunately, most of these tools do static analysis and still have limitations when it comes to detecting some critical situations;

3) Code Testing: Related to the analysis of software is software quality testing. In the last few years, a large number of programmers have been adopting agile techniques that foster the usage of test-driven development, feature-driven development, and continuous integration and deployment. The main drawback is that tests are being written by the same programmers developing applications, making the development slower, and resulting in biased unit tests.

This Special Issue’s main focus is the development of tools and practices to help developers in these three aspects.

Prof. Alberto Simões
Prof. Ricardo Queirós
Prof. Mário Pinto
Guest Editors

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