MAYA SOFTWARE, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: Unit testing is the prevailing approach used by programmers worldwide to verify their deci

Description

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.