Software analysis: a road map

Abstract

Research on software analysis has long history. It has been widely used in many processes in software lifecycle. The software analysis technologies that are used in different processes are different, while there are many interleaves among them. This paper discusses the concept of software analysis, followed with main software analysis technologies and related tools, from view of static analysis and dynamic analysis. Some relationships between software analysis and software quality characters are introduced, so as to provide some hints when some specific software character is under analyzing. The future of software analysis is discussed in the end of this paper.