Change Impact Analysis, Root Cause Analysis, and AI-based Repair for Safe and Secure Software Evolution

Introduction

Software is the driving force of today's world. Used in almost any system, it has a wide-ranging impact on every area of private and public life, from health to finance, education, entertainment, business, and government.

Challenges in Software Development

Developing software is a cognitively demanding task. Coming up with a software solution for a problem is already challenging, and continuous changes in requirements and in the environment where software is used make it even harder.

As a result, bugs and security vulnerabilities are often introduced during software development. To make things worse, even when these issues are discovered and reported, many of them remain unfixed due to a lack of developer time.

The Promise of Generative AI

Generative AI promises to change the game by being able to automatically repair code. However, it requires developers to validate that the proposed software fixes correctly address the issues, while simultaneously checking that they do not introduce unintended behavior.

FORTE: An AI-Augmented Solution

FORTE combines automated change-impact analysis with automated root cause analysis and AI-based repair to enable an AI-augmented process of developing software.

Our goal with FORTE is to help developers confidently change software without breaking it in unexpected ways, and embrace generative AI to simplify the process of writing and fixing code.

Demonstration of Usefulness

To demonstrate the usefulness of FORTE, we plan to use it with real-world software that is publicly available.