Build a fact extractor for Python programs

Abstract

Software programs’ sizes are increasing since more features are built to meet the growing demands. Each version of a program must advance and address the flaws in previous versions over a short period. As the software programs evolve, program facts can be drawn from software artifacts to understand the dependencies among different pieces of code in a program and provide interesting insights about the version changes. These facts can, therefore, also be used for quality assurance. Although fact extractors have been discussed for other various languages, there has been little done for Python. This report seeks to explore how facts can be extracted and stored in a “fact base” for Python programs by showing the approaches to writing fact extractors.