Towards Modal Software Engineering

TL;DR

This paper introduces Modal Software Engineering, a method to transform sequential programs into efficient, semantically equivalent programs that operate across multiple overlapping input worlds, inspired by modal logic.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach to handle multiple overlapping input domains efficiently, applicable to software variability, probabilistic programming, and approximate computing.

Findings

Enables efficient processing across multiple overlapping worlds

Reduces redundancy compared to independent processing

Applicable to SPL variability, probabilistic, and approximate programming

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the notion of Modal Software Engineering: automatically turning sequential, deterministic programs into semantically equivalent programs efficiently operating on inputs coming from multiple overlapping worlds. We are drawing an analogy between modal logics, and software application domains where multiple sets of inputs (multiple worlds) need to be processed efficiently. Typically those sets highly overlap, so processing them independently would involve a lot of redundancy, resulting in lower performance, and in many cases intractability. Three application domains are presented: reasoning about feature-based variability of Software Product Lines (SPLs), probabilistic programming, and approximate programming.