Proseminar: Incremental Approaches to Program Analysis

This proseminar will be given in German.

Program analysis is the scientific field where programs are the subject of study. Its goal is to show evidence for certain properties of the program under test. For example, we can show that data successfully reaches its goal in the program or that sensitive data does not flow to places in the program where it can leak to the public. 

Since software systems are increasingly larger in size, partly because of third party libraries, the resource consumption of program analyses increases as well. Incremental approaches can be a tool to tackle those problems: They precompute or reuse partial results from previous analysis runs to reduce the resource consumption for subsequent executions. This can even lead to benefits in analysis soundness and precision. Of course, such benefits might come at the cost of increased implementation complexity.

In this seminar, we will investigate different incremental approaches to program analysis, and analyze their advantages as well as potential drawbacks and limitations.

The proseminar will be held in the form of a "discussion seminar". All seminar participants meet every two weeks for a session in which, after a short introduction, a specific topic is freely discussed. For each session, corresponding papers have to be worked through, which are announced in advance. For each paper, a seminar participant prepares a short presentation (~10 min), which is presented to the seminar at the beginning of the corresponding session. The final grade for the proseminar evaluates the quality of the discussion contributions, the short presentation as well as a short written paper, which has to be prepared at the end of the seminar.