Abstract

The ultra-large-scale systems of the future require the transformation of software engineering into a computational discipline capable of fast and dependable software development. This paper discusses an emerging next-generation software engineering research area: function extraction (FX) technology for automated computation to the maximum extent possible of the behavior, correctness, and quality attributes of software components and their compositions into systems. An introduction to the mathematical foundations for computation of software behavior is provided, followed by an overview description of a rigorously designed experiment to quantify the potential for FX technology, and a discussion of a CERT STAR*Lab first application of FX technology to compute the behavior of code expressed in the Intel assembly language instruction set. 1. A History Lesson in Complexity When the Normans conquered England in the 11 th century, a census was ordered to catalog what had been won. But after the data were collected, the required summations were not produced despite the obvious interest in the results. The census had been recorded in Roman numerals, and the complexity of adding up so many numbers in that system was overwhelming. Yet if the census had been recorded in decimal arithmetic with place notation, the required sums could have been produced in short order. There is a lesson here for the problems of presentday computing. It is that technology can either add

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