PICT, A Tool For Interactively Capturing and Managing Programmer's Intentions

It is all too common for a project to create software that is hard to maintain, inefficient, bug-ridden, late, and over-budget. Software flaws resulting from this current state of affairs are no longer an inconvenience but are the primary source of software security vulnerabilities. Motivated by a desire to increase our ability to reduce software flaws, we propose a new kind of programmer assistant tool, PICT (Programmer Intent Capture Tool). PICT augments the programmer's toolbox by enabling programmers to describe code properties that can express a wide range of programmer intentions: from low level code assertions to high level design decisions. PICT analyzes and displays these properties continuously during software development. PICT will interactively capture code properties and allow for the managing, analysis, and display of these properties during software development. The tool is designed to provide feedback about global analyses of the program, display feedback continuously, use and work with external code analysis tools, be unobtrusive to the programmer, and distinguish inferred properties from intended properties.