Software Quality Assurance by Static Program Analysis

Static program analysis is a viable, sound and automatic technique to prove correctness properties about programs, both functional properties as well as non-functional properties. It is one of the techniques, highly recommended for high criticality levels by several international software-quality standards for the domains of transportation, healthcare, factory automation, and electric/electronic systems. The precision of static analysis increases the more information is made available to it. This additional information can be given by programmer annotations, or it can be transferred from the model level in model-based software design. We give an introduction to static program analysis as a verification technology, describe several applications to the development of safety-critical systems, and show how it can be integrated into a model-based design flow.