Tools and behavioral abstraction: A direction for software engineering

Abstract

As in other engineering professions, software engineers rely on tools. Such tools can analyze program texts and design specifications more automatically and in more detail than ever before. While many tools today are applied to find new defects in old code, I predict that more software-engineering tools of the future will be available to software authors at the time of authoring. If such analysis tools can be made to be fast enough and easy enough to use, they can help software engineers better produce and evolve programs. A programming language shapes how software engineers approach problems. Yet the abstraction level of many popular languages today is not much higher than that of C programs several decades ago. Moreover, the abstraction level is the same throughout the program text, leaving no room for behavioral abstraction where the design of a program is divided up into stages that gradually introduce more details. A stronger arsenal of analysis tools can enable languages and development environments to give good support for behavioral abstraction. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.