Parsing for agile modeling

• We identify the problem of deriving a model from a software system as a major bottleneck.
• We define “agile model” and pose it as a research challenge.
• We survey previous attempts to solve the agile modeling problem.
• We summarize our current work on island parsing in this context.

In order to analyze software systems, it is necessary to model them. Static software models are commonly imported by parsing source code and related data. Unfortunately, building custom parsers for most programming languages is a non-trivial endeavor. This poses a major bottleneck for analyzing software systems programmed in languages for which importers do not already exist. Luckily, initial software models do not require detailed parsers, so it is possible to start analysis with a coarse-grained importer, which is then gradually refined. In this paper we propose an approach to “agile modeling” that exploits island grammars to extract initial coarse-grained models, parser combinators to enable gradual refinement of model importers, and various heuristics to recognize language structure, keywords and other language artifacts.