Program analysis and evaluation using QUIMERA

Abstract

During last years, a new challenge rose up inside the programming communities: the programming contests. Programming contests can vary slightly in the rules but all of them are intended to assess the competitor skills concerning the ability to solve problems using a computer. These contests raise up three kind of challenges: to create a nice problem statement (for the members of the scientific committee); to solve the problem in a good way (for the programmers); to find a fair way to assess the results (for the judges). This paper presents a web-based application, QUIMERA intended to be a full programming-contest management system, as well as an automatic judge. Besides the traditional dynamic approach for program evaluation, QUIMERA still provides static analysis of the program for a more fine assessment of solutions. Static analysis takes profit from the technology developed for compilers and language-based tools and is supported by source code analysis and software metrics.