Enhancing Code Awareness in Software Development Environment

A programmer is usually focused on the code on his screen, leading to a kind of tunnel vision where large-scale interactions are missed. The proposed Code Awareness Assistant (CA2) will automatically provide programmers with an additional level of awareness as they program in C/C++. CA2 builds on existing and novel analyses to give real-time feedback. CA2 will function as a second pair of eyes that watches the programmer as she makes changes. CA2 will infer, summarize, and display information about the software as it is being developed. The programmer will be alerted to such problems as they are introduced, allowing rapid investigation and mitigation while the system"s details are fresh in the programmer"s mind. Programmers will therefore avoid the cost overhead that comes when problems are not detected until testing or, worse, after the system is fielded. CA2 uses modern program analysis techniques to infer properties about software; the same techniques power commercial bug-finding tools. CA2 presents information using text and graphical representations, using whichever format can best convey a particular property. CA2 works inside the programmer"s IDE so that information is available as code is written.