A Code Analysis Tool for High-Integrity Systems

Research is currently underway to produce guidelines for the development of mission and safety critical systems implemented in Ada 95. This research will analyze whether certain features of Ada 95 should be included or excluded from a critical application. To be of practical value such an analysis will require specific tool support. The Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) defines a vendor independent API for accessing both the syntactic and semantic information stored within an Ada compiler's library. In this Phase I proposal, we propose to design a tool utilizing ASIS, which is compiler and platform independent and which will allow code to be analyzed based on the evolving standard guidelines for critical systems. The design will employ a layered approach separating the GUI, the ASIS query engine and the report generator. This combined with the use of Ada/Java technology will allow the tool to operate on multiple platforms with little or no modification. The design will be object-oriented with emphasis and utilizing and developing reusable components wherever possible. The design will be expressed in the Unified Modeling Language (UML).