Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
"Automatic Dimension Inference and Checking for Object-Oriented Programs". Sudheendra Hangal and Monica S. Lam (eds.), International Conference on Software Engineering, 2009.

Abstract
This paper introduces UniFi, a tool that attempts to automatically detect dimension errors in Java programs. UniFi infers dimensional relationships across primitive type and string variables in a program, using an inter-procedural, context-sensitive analysis. It then monitors these dimensional relationships as the program evolves, flagging inconsistencies that may be errors. UniFi requires no programmer annotations, and supports arbitrary program-specific dimensions, thus providing fine-grained dimensional consistency checking. UniFi exploits features of object-oriented languages, but can be used for other languages as well. We have run UniFi on real-life Java code and found that it is useful in exposing dimension errors. We present a case study of using UniFi on nightly builds of a 19,000 line code base as it evolved over 10 months.

Electronic downloads

• http://suif.stanford.edu/papers/unifi.pdf

• HTML

   <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/735.html"
  ><i>Automatic Dimension Inference and Checking for
  Object-Oriented Programs</i></a>, Sudheendra
  Hangal and Monica S. Lam (eds.), International Conference on
  Software  Engineering, 2009.

• Plain text

   "Automatic Dimension Inference and Checking for
  Object-Oriented Programs". Sudheendra Hangal and Monica
  S. Lam (eds.), International Conference on Software 
  Engineering, 2009.

• BibTeX

  @proceedings{HangalLam09_AutomaticDimensionInferenceCheckingForObjectOriented,
      title = {Automatic Dimension Inference and Checking for
                Object-Oriented Programs},
      editor = {Sudheendra Hangal and Monica S. Lam},
      organization = {International Conference on Software  Engineering},
      year = {2009},
      abstract = {This paper introduces UniFi, a tool that attempts
                to automatically detect dimension errors in Java
                programs. UniFi infers dimensional relationships
                across primitive type and string variables in a
                program, using an inter-procedural,
                context-sensitive analysis. It then monitors these
                dimensional relationships as the program evolves,
                flagging inconsistencies that may be errors. UniFi
                requires no programmer annotations, and supports
                arbitrary program-specific dimensions, thus
                providing fine-grained dimensional consistency
                checking. UniFi exploits features of
                object-oriented languages, but can be used for
                other languages as well. We have run UniFi on
                real-life Java code and found that it is useful in
                exposing dimension errors. We present a case study
                of using UniFi on nightly builds of a 19,000 line
                code base as it evolved over 10 months.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/735.html}
  }
  

Posted by Jessica Gamble on 3 May 2010.
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