Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

To What Extent Could We Detect Field Defects? —An Empirical Study Of False Negatives In Static Bug Finding Tools, Ferdian Thung, - Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Premkumar Devanbu, Foyzur Rahman

David LO

Software defects can cause much loss. Static bug-finding tools are believed to help detect and remove defects. These tools are designed to find programming errors; but, do they in fact help prevent actual defects that occur in the field and reported by users? If these tools had been used, would they have detected these field defects, and generated warnings that would direct programmers to fix them? To answer these questions, we perform an empirical study that investigates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art static bug finding tools on hundreds of reported and fixed defects extracted from three open source programs: Lucene, Rhino, …