Publications

Espinoza, Juan E.; Campbell, Philip L.

This report provides a summary of the work completed in the Source Code Assurance Tool project. This work was done as part of the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

Craft, Richard L.; Espinoza, Juan E.; Campbell, Philip L.; Espinoza, Juan E.

This report provides a preliminary functional description of a novel software application, the Source Code Assurance Tool, which would assist a system analyst in the software assessment process. An overview is given of the tool's functionality and design; and how the analyst would use it to assess a body of source code. This work was done as part of a Laboratory Directed Research and Development project.

Campbell, Philip L.; Espinoza, Juan E.

In this paper we describe a new language, Visual Structure Language (VSL), designed to describe the structure of a program and explain its pieces. This new language is built on top of a general-purpose language, such as C. The language consists of three extensions: explanations, nesting, and arcs. Explanations are comments explicitly associated with code segments. These explanations can be nested. And arcs can be inserted between explanations to show data- or control-flow. The value of VSL is that it enables a developer to better control a code. The developer can represent the structure via nested explanations, using arcs to indicate the flow of data and control. The explanations provide a ''second opinion'' about the code so that at any level, the developer can confirm that the code operates as it is intended to do. We believe that VSL enables a programmer to use in a computer language the same model--a hierarchy of components--that they use in their heads when they conceptualize systems.

Campbell, Philip L.; Espinoza, Juan E.

We present the tool we built as part of a Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project. This tool consists of a commercially-available, graphical editor front-end, combined with a back end ''slicer.'' The significance of the tool is that it shows how to slice across system components. This is an advance from slicing across program components.

Campbell, Philip L.; Espinoza, Juan E.

In this paper we describe a tool for analyzing systems. The analysis is based on program slicing. It answers the following question for the software: if the value of a particular variable changes, what other variable values also change, and what is the path in between? program slicing was developed based on intra-procedure control and data flow. It has been expanded commercially to inter-procedure flow. However, we extend slicing to collections of programs and non-program entities, which we term multi-domain systems. The value of our tool is that an analyst can model the entirety of a system, not just the software, and we believe that this makes for a significant increase in power. We are building a prototype system.