Enhancing Code Awareness in Software Development Environment

Unit testing is the prevailing approach used by programmers worldwide to verify their decisions and assumptions on a unit, or module level. Even with the advent of automated unit-test frameworks, a programmer"s knowhow can seldom be shared with other programmers; in addition, no tool alerts to programmer about the concerns associated with his or her on-the-fly programming decisions. Our proposed innovation will enhance unit test frameworks with a sharable learning and pattern-matching tool. The tool will automatically learn from the experience gained by programmers in a group (as manifested by the concerns they addressed in their unit-test suites, e.g. in a buffer overflow related test-suite), and will later direct other programmers to be aware of similar concerns when the tool detects, using pattern matching techniques, that they are manipulating data-structures with similar concerns (e.g., when their code manipulates a buffer it is related to the buffer-overflow concern). Once alerting the programmer to concerns related to his or her emerging program, the tool will also suggest a set of tests developed by other programmers that covers this concern (e.g., buffer-overflow tests). Discovering new related tests will help the programmer to better understand address these concerns.