HeteroGenius: A Framework for Hybrid Analysis of Heterogeneous Software Specifications
This addresses the need for integrated software analysis tools to prevent costly or life-threatening failures, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methodologies.
The authors tackled the problem of software failures by developing HeteroGenius, a framework for hybrid analysis of heterogeneous software specifications, which enables users to combine different analysis techniques through a graphical interface and was demonstrated by implementing Dynamite as a case-study.
Nowadays, software artifacts are ubiquitous in our lives being an essential part of home appliances, cars, cell phones, and even in more critical activities like aeronautics and health sciences. In this context software failures may produce enormous losses, either economical or, in the worst case, in human lives. Software analysis is an area in software engineering concerned with the application of diverse techniques in order to prove the absence of errors in software pieces. In many cases different analysis techniques are applied by following specific methodological combinations that ensure better results. These interactions between tools are usually carried out at the user level and it is not supported by the tools. In this work we present HeteroGenius, a framework conceived to develop tools that allow users to perform hybrid analysis of heterogeneous software specifications. HeteroGenius was designed prioritising the possibility of adding new specification languages and analysis tools and enabling a synergic relation of the techniques under a graphical interface satisfying several well-known usability enhancement criteria. As a case-study we implemented the functionality of Dynamite on top of HeteroGenius.