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

The so-called"software crisis"is continuing unabated. It is all too common for a software 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 largest source of software security vulnerabilities. Motivated by a desire to increase our ability to reduce software flaws, we propose to add to the software engineer's toolbox a new tool---one that is complementary to existing type checking, testing, and verification approaches---which can measurably increase programmer productivity and decrease software defects. This new tool will interactively capture code properties and allow for the managing, analysis, and display of these properties during software development. The code properties that can be captured by our tool can range from low level code assertions ('p'isn't a null pointer) to high level design decisions (class'C'is a singleton class). The tool is designed to provide feedback about global analyses of the program, work in real-time, be unobtrusive to the programmer, distinguish inferred properties from intended properties, and minimize programmer input.