what's new
Tool That Shows How to Develop Software with Predictable Behavior Now Available for Downloading
The PACC Starter Kit (PSK) is an integrated set of development tools that demonstrates how today’s technologies can be combined to deliver objective confidence in predictions of software behavior. The essence of the PSK is the ability to
- describe the behavior of individual components and how they are assembled to form a software application
- predict how the assembled application will behave with respect to critical runtime quality attributes such as performance, security, or safety
- obtain some objective basis for trusting that the predictions are accurate
To achieve this vision, the PSK includes such technologies as - a design language based on UML statecharts for describing component behavior and descriptions of how components are assembled
- code generator for creating implementations ready to execute in the provided execution environment (the Pin component technology and a real-time extensions layer for Windows)
- several quality attribute analyses
- performance analysis for worst-case, average-case, and sporadic-server latency
- behavior analysis for user specified claims of software behavior (e.g., satisfaction of application specific invariants, conformance to interaction protocols, or absence of deadlock)
- security analysis for detecting buffer overflows in C code
- memory analysis for anticipated resource use
- performance analysis for worst-case, average-case, and sporadic-server latency
- accompanying means of demonstrating objective confidence. For example, statistical measures of confidence in performance analysis are based on data supplied by measurement tools included in the kit.
In the behavior analysis, execution traces are used to demonstrate failure and proof generation is used to demonstrate success.
These technologies are integrated into an Eclipse-based development environment that allows users to experiment with applying these varying technologies to a software design or architecture. Integrated help and self-guided tutorials are included to facilitate understanding.
To download the PACC Starter Kit, go to http://www.sei.cmu.edu/pacc/starter-kit.html.
Added May 9, 2008