Domain Knowledge Driven Program Analysis

During maintenance activities programmers make pervasive use of domain knowledge about the code that they maintain. Unfortunately, most of the current program analysis techniques do not explicitly take into consideration knowledge about the domain of the analyzed program. In this paper we advocate the need to use the domain knowledge explicitly in reverse engineering in order to enhance the current analyses with logical information about the implemented domain and to enable new program analyses at the conceptual level. We outline a set of basic ingredients needed by domain knowledge driven program analyses and sketch our approach to interpret program parts from the point of view of the knowledge of the application domain that they implement by defining the intentional meaning of programs. 1 The need for domain knowledge in