Putting escape analysis to work for software testing

Abstract

Developed primarily for optimization of functional and object-oriented software, escape analysis discerns information to determine whether the lifetime of data exceeds its static scope. We demonstrate how to apply escape analysis to software engineering tasks. In particular we present novel software testing and retesting techniques for object-oriented software which utilize escape analysis. We exploit a combined pointer and escape analysis that is able to identify how individual objects allocated in one region of a program interact with other regions of a program. The analysis framework increases flexibility and scalability as testing coverage can be targeted to a specific arbitrary region of a program, followed by integration testing that can be focused on particular sets of objects escaping the region. We demonstrate how regression testing can be performed utilizing this framework. We believe such a flexible framework becomes increasingly beneficial as applications become more component-oriented.