Comments analysis and programming errors

Software validation is treated as the problem of detecting errors that programmers make during the software development process. This includes fault detection, in which the focus is on techniques for detecting the occurrence of local errors that result in well-defined classes of program statement faults. It also includes detecting other kinds of errors, such as decomposition errors. The main focus of the work is on a decomposition-error analysis technique called comments analysis. In this technique, errors are detected by analyzing special classes of program comments. Comments analysis has been applied to a variety of systems, including a data-processing program and an avionics real-time program. The use of comments analysis for sequential and concurrent systems is discussed, and the basic features of comments analysis tools are summarized. The relationship of comments analysis to other techniques, such as event sequence analysis, is discussed, and the differences between it and earlier work are explained.<>