How to find actionable static analysis warnings: A case study with FindBugs

Automatically generated static code warnings suffer from a large number of false alarms. Hence, developers only take action on a small percent of those warnings. To better predict which static code warnings should ot be ignored, we suggest that analysts need to look deeper into their algorithms to f...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: YEDIDA, Rahul, KANG, Hong Jin, TU, Huy, YANG, Xueqi, LO, David, MENZIES, Tim
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7768
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8771/viewcontent/ActionableStaticAnalysisWarn_av.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Automatically generated static code warnings suffer from a large number of false alarms. Hence, developers only take action on a small percent of those warnings. To better predict which static code warnings should ot be ignored, we suggest that analysts need to look deeper into their algorithms to find choices that better improve the particulars of their specific problem. Specifically, we show here that effective predictors of such warnings can be created by methods that ocally adjust the decision boundary (between actionable warnings and others). These methods yield a new high water-mark for recognizing actionable static code warnings. For eight open-source Java projects (cassandra, jmeter, commons, lucene-solr, maven, ant, tomcat, derby) we achieve perfect test results on 4/8 datasets and, overall, a median AUC (area under the true negatives, true positives curve) of 92%.