Re: Test tool not only for Ada

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

"S�nke Brix" writes:
> Hi Softwareengineers and Testgurus,
>
> I read something about the tool "PolySpace". The test approach of this tool
> seems a little bit different. In an advertisment the company describes that
> "PolySpace"
> - ...statically analyses the dynamics of sw applications by relying solely
> on the source code,
> - ...no test cases to write
> - ...no instrumentation of the code
> - ...no execution of the application
> Hmmm ????
> How does this stuff work? I found some infos, but they were not very
> helpful. Something over "semantic analysis", but not very deep. I this a
> pure mathematically analysis scheme?
>
> So, who has a deep knowledge and is able to explain the secrets of this test
> tool and especially the mathematics and techniques behind the scenes.
>
> Thanx

I think you should qsk them for the details.  I attended their
presentation at the Ada-Belgium general assembly in 2003 [1].  The
basic principle is to leverage the rich information contained in a
typical Ada program, especially the range constraints, and then
propagating these constraints down every execution path to detect
possible violations.  This analysis is only possible in Ada; lesser
languages require annotations to provide the information about range
constraints.

[1] http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/03/030225-abga-event.html

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.