Concurrent and Distributed Pseudocode: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Pseudocode is a valuable resource used in programming education, software development, and scientific reports for designing algorithmic solutions as it is easy to write, understand, and modify. Since pseudocode is lacking in its ability to be tested, it is difficult to determine whether a pseudocode solution is correct or not. Software tools are specially required to reach this goal, e.g., helping professors find race conditions, deadlocks, or starvation issues while grading students’ concurrent pseudocode. Although there are various tools to work with sequential pseudocode, there is a lack of tools to work with concurrent pseudocode. This shortage motivated us to determine the state-of-the-art in notations and tools for testing concurrent and distributed pseudocode. We conducted a systematic literature review and found only a few related publications, confirming that this topic is understudied. We found and report about five software tools capable of interpreting concurrent or distributed pseudocode, and two software tools capable of verifying its correctness. As another result, no other literature review was found about this topic, conferring novelty to the contributions of this work.