Research

Research that becomes
real analysis and testing tools

Interpretica grew out of program-analysis research. The methods we publish and prototype turn directly into Visao, TS Factory, Delta and Midair.

Peer-reviewed publications

Our founder publishes on program analysis

Maxim Menshikov (Founder & CEO) has a body of peer-reviewed work on static analysis, program-analysis intermediate representations and developer tools.

Several of these results are now part of our platform, among them the Midair IR and the Visao engine.

View publications on Google Scholar
Published at
ICCSAGRIDTMPASEIMProceedings of ISP RAS

Research directions

Our research is not abstract. Each direction below solves a concrete problem in analysing and testing complex software, and each has produced results we ship or rely on today.

Language-agnostic static analysis

One analyzer, many languages. Instead of maintaining a separate tool per language, we lower source code into a shared semantic representation and reason about that, so a detector written once works across a codebase.

Result Midair IRVisao

The Midair intermediate representation and the Visao engine.

Midair: An Intermediate Representation for Multi-purpose Program Analysis (ICCSA 2020); Scalable semantic virtual machine framework for language-agnostic static analysis (GRID 2018).

Reasoning about program behavior

We combine model checking with abstract interpretation to explore how code behaves across execution paths, surfacing defects that emerge from complex interactions inside a program, beyond known bug patterns.

Result EquidVisao

Equid, our earlier static-analysis framework, is the direct predecessor of today's Visao engine, whose path-sensitive detectors grew out of this work.

Equid — a static analysis framework for industrial applications (ICCSA 2019).

Report quality: findings you can act on

A finding is only useful if an engineer can act on it. We research how to measure and improve the completeness and relevance of analysis output, and how to cut false positives that erode trust.

Result 5W+1HVisao

The 5W+1H report-quality measure, guiding how Visao ranks and presents findings.

5W+1H static analysis report quality measure (TMPA 2017).

Resident & scalable analysis

Analysis should run continuously and incrementally on large codebases, not as a slow batch step. We study resident analyzers that stay live, and service models for delivering analysis at scale.

Result VisaoCI/CD

The way Visao integrates into CI/CD and stays fast on big projects.

Towards a resident static analysis (ICCSA 2019); Review of static analyzer service models (Proceedings of ISP RAS, 2021).

Embedded & resource-constrained systems

Testing and virtualization for constrained devices, firmware and network hardware, where reproducing the exact environment is half the problem. We research how to isolate, snapshot and run tests on such targets reliably.

Result TS FactoryDelta

Informs TS Factory's device labs and Delta's runtime capture.

Design and testing of an LXC-based virtualization system for resource-constrained MIPS devices (SEIM 2018).

Distributed testing & runtime observability

How to run large multi-host test scenarios, record the exact environment each result came from, and connect runtime evidence back to the code findings that explain it.

Result TS FactoryDeltaMidair

TS Factory (distributed testing) and Delta (runtime monitoring), tied together by Midair.

Selected publications

2021
  • Review of static analyzer service modelsProceedings of ISP RAS
2020
  • Midair: An Intermediate Representation for Multi-purpose Program AnalysisICCSA
2019
  • Equid — a static analysis framework for industrial applicationsICCSA
  • Towards a resident static analysisICCSA
2018
  • Scalable semantic virtual machine framework for language-agnostic static analysisGRID
  • Design and testing of an LXC-based virtualization system for resource-constrained MIPS devicesSEIM
2017
  • 5W+1H static analysis report quality measureTMPA
Full list and citations on Google Scholar

Market research

Independent market and landscape reports we publish on the testing, static analysis and cybersecurity industry: company overviews, tool comparisons and AI-risk analysis.

View reports