A Program Synthesis Approach for Adding Architectural Tactics to An Existing Code Base

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel program synthesis method that automatically generates and integrates architectural tactics into existing codebases, addressing challenges of context-awareness and dependency management.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach for synthesizing architectural tactics and seamlessly incorporating them into existing programs, enhancing automation and reducing developer effort.

Findings

Successfully synthesizes architectural tactics based on code context

Ensures correct data- and control-dependencies in integration

Facilitates reuse of architectural tactics in existing code

Abstract

Automatically constructing a program based on given specifications has been studied for decades. Despite the advances in the field of Program Synthesis, the current approaches still synthesize a block of code snippet and leave the task of reusing it in an existing code base to program developers. Due to its program-wide effects, synthesizing an architectural tactic and reusing it in a program is even more challenging. Architectural tactics need to be synthesized based on the context of different locations of the program, broken down to smaller pieces, and added to corresponding locations in the code. Moreover, each piece needs to establish correct data- and control-dependencies to its surrounding environment as well as to the other synthesized pieces. This is an error-prone and challenging task, especially for novice program developers. In this paper, we introduce a novel program synthesis approach that synthesizes architectural tactics and adds them to an existing code base.