Abstract

Throughout the years software engineers have come up with a myriad of specialized tools and techniques that focus on a certain type of software analysis such as source code analysis, duplication analysis, co-change analysis, bug prediction, or detection of bug fixing patterns. However, easy and straight forward synergies between these analyses and tools rarely exist because of their stand-alone nature, their platform dependence, their different input and output formats and the variety of data to analyze. As a consequence, distributed and collaborative software analysis scenarios and in particular interoperability are severely limited. We describe a distributed and collaborative software analysis platform that allows for a seamless interoperability of software analysis tools across platform, geographical and organizational boundaries. We realize software analysis tools as services that can be accessed and composed over the Internet. These distributed analysis services shall be widely accessible in our incrementally augmented Software Analysis Broker where organizations and tool providers can register and share their tools. To allow (semi)-automatic use and composition of these tools, they are classified and mapped into a software analysis taxonomy and adhere to specific meta-models and ontologies for their category of analysis.