Eric Bodden

6°C

In the upcoming summer semester, Martin Monperrus and I will be teaching a new course on Automated Software Engineering, here at TU Darmstadt. During the course we will look at the entire development life-cycle from a tool perspective: How can automated tools support programmers during the design, implementation, testing and maintenance of a software product? We will talk about approaches to…

• automated analysis & definition of requirements
• computer-aided design of software
• implementation with intelligent IDEs
• automated testing and verification
• computer-aided bug finding
• aiding program understanding by mining latent specifications from existing software
• advanced debugging & profiling techniques
• computer-aided refactoring and documentation

The course webpage contains a rough outline of the topics that we have planned but at this point we are still open for suggestions, as long as they fit the general topic.

I am happy to announce that the camera-ready version of my ICSE paper is available now. The topic is on a special kind of static typestate analysis that I developed to soundly disable unnecessary instrumentation for monitoring typestate properties at runtime. The implementation is available in Clara.

Over the holidays I was able to finalize my dissertation on “Verifying finite-state properties of large-scale programs”.

It’s a great feeling to get this weight of my shoulders. 311 pages were not easy to manage in the end… Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the document, especially to Jan Sinscheck, who still found quite a few typos and misplaced commata in the end. The thesis will shortly be available through eScholarship@McGill and through ProQuest (as PDF and in print).

On November 11th I passed my thesis defense in Montreal. Thanks a lot to everybody who congratulated me already! The event was fun, actually. I received many questions by my committee but fortunately I was able to answer all of them.

Here are two photos of the event.

Lots of people commented on my slides and so I thought that I should put them online. Here is an extended version of the talk, which I presented in Darmstadt. Available for Keynote (25 MB) and as PDF (93 MB – yes I do like using lots of pictures). The slides give information about both the Clara framework and the Nop-Shadows Analysis.

A few days ago I am on a new payroll. I am still working for Mira Mezini and within her research group, but I am now funded by and also doing research for CASED, the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt. With the new job come new responsibilities: I am now responsible for coordinating the CASED-internal graduate school, i.e., organizing courses, managing student affairs, etc.

The CASED research cluster is actually doing quite some exciting research. Folks here conduct research on all levels of security, from low-level hardware issues to secure architectures.

For me, nothing else will change, really. My main task will, fortunately, still remain pursuing fun (and hopefully useful) research. Just to let you know so that nobody is getting confused about my new affiliation…

What else is happening? Since I finished writing up my thesis in Montreal, I have been busy getting settled in Germany again and refilling the paper pipeline. Next week I will be back to Montreal for my thesis defense. Wednesday is the day to keep your fingers crossed for me.

I just uploaded a new Technical Report. The report (currently under submission) describes a novel typestate analysis, called Nop-Shadows Analysis,  that I implemented for my doctoral dissertation. The analysis is certainly one of my dissertation’s major technical contributions. I implemented the Nop-Shadows Analysis in the Clara framework, which means that you are welcome to download it, try it out or extend it.

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In my doctoral dissertation (click here for a draft), I present Clara (Compile-time Approximation of Runtime Analyses), a novel research framework for the implementation of hybrid typestate analyses. Clara is now online – fully documented – at: http://www.bodden.de/clara/

Typestate properties aid program understanding, and one can even define type systems that prevent programmers from causing typestate errors, or derive static typestate analyses that try to determine whether a given program violates typestate properties. Unfortunately, the typestate-analysis problem is generally undecidable. Researchers have therefore proposed a hybrid approach that uses
static-analysis results to generate a residual runtime monitor. This monitor captures actual property violations as they occur, but only updates its internal state at relevant statements, as determined through static analysis.

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