Practical Analysis Tools for Large-Scale Software

UC Berkeley's Manu Sridharan presents two techniques -- refinement-based pointer analysis and thin slicing -- that enable powerful new tools for debugging and understanding large-scale software. His group’s refinement-based pointer analysis is the first to compute precise answers in interactive time, allowing tools to handle previously inscrutable program behaviors interactively. Thin slicing is the first technique to give usable answers to code relevance questions, a long-standing challenge for analysis tools. Sridharan also describes new tools enabled by the two techniques.