[SystemSafety] Candidates for the firing squad

[Olwen Morgan]

On 20/09/18 14:51, David Haworth wrote:
> These days, the name "static analysis" seems to have been misappropriated
> to cover the whole gamut of source code verification tools.
>

A few years ago, I gave a talk at a conference where I distinguished 
between "static analysis" and "dynamic analysis", saying that static 
analysis is analysis basically takes very little notice of all possible 
executions and dynamic analysis tries to take account of all possible 
executions. I was then jumped on by an extremely irritating academic 
whose field was software testing and who said that the term "dynamic 
analysis" had already been coined by testers to mean test coverage 
measurement by code instrumentation.

Big deal.

Inapt use of terms is rife in software engineering. But we really do 
need to distinguish the different kinds of capability that are currently 
subsumed under the term "static analysis". Far too much of the 
lumpenprogrammariat thinks that lint checks the static analysis box in a 
process audit.


O



Olwen Morgan CITP, MBCS olwen.morgan at btinternet.com +44 (0) 7854 899667 
Carmarthenshire, Wales, UK