An Extensible Meta-Model for Program Analysis

Software maintenance tools for program analysisand refactoring rely on a meta-model capturing the relevantproperties of programs. However, what is considered relevantmay change when the tools are extended with new analyses andrefactorings, and new programming languages. This paper proposesa language independent meta-model and an architecture toconstruct instances thereof, which is extensible for new analyses,refactorings, and new front-ends of programming languages. Dueto the loose coupling between analysis-, refactoring-, and frontend-components, new components can be added independentlyand reuse existing ones. Two maintenance tools implementingthe meta-model and the architecture, VIZZANALYZER and XDEVELOP,serve as a proof of concept.