SOFAS: software analysis services

We propose a distributed and collaborative software analysis platform to enable seamless interoperability of software analysis tools across platform, geographical and organizational boundaries. In particular, we devise software analysis tools as services that can be accessed and composed over the Internet. These distributed services shall be widely accessible through a software analysis broker where organizations and research groups can register and share their tools. To enable (semi)-automatic use and composition of these tools, they will be classified and mapped into a software analysis taxonomy and adhere to specific meta-models and ontologies for their category of analysis. We claim that moving software analysis "outside the lab and into the Web" is highly beneficial from many point of views. Simple, common analyses can be effortlessly combined together into much meaningful, complex and novel ones. Analyses can be run everywhere and anytime without the need to install several tools and to cope with many output formats. Empirical studies can be easily replicated. At last, we claim that this will greatly help in the maturing of the field and boost its role in supporting software development practices.