Program Analysis (Winter Semester 2023/24)

Quick Facts

Content

This course introduces the principles and practice of automatically analyzing large software systems. The course provides an overview of program analysis and then covers three topics in more detail: Static analysis, which analyzes the source code of a program, dynamic analysis, which reasons about the runtime behavior of a program, and test generation, which creates inputs to run programs. In addition to lectures, students will deepen their understanding through a practical course project (implement a program analysis based on an existing framework) and homework assignments. Besides academic achievements, the course will help students to improve their programming skills by learning about common sources of mistakes and about techniques to find them.

Organization

The course will be classroom-first, i.e., to the extent possible, all activities will be in a physical classroom or based on physical meetings. Slides and other material will be made available during the semester, usually soon after the corresponding lecture. For students who cannot physically attend the course, e.g., due to sickness: Lecture videos from a previous year are available in this playlist. Note that the content covered in this semester will be similar, but not exactly the same.

Schedule

This is a preliminary schedule and may be subject to change. "L" stands for lecture, "P" stands for project, and "E" stands for exercise. Events printed in bold are deadlines (strict).

Course Project

The course project is about implementing a program analysis for a real-world language. More details will be published during the semester.