A controlled experiment to evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of four static program analysis tools for Java programs
Akash Kumar Tripathi, Atul Kumar Gupta · 2014
This paper presents the results of an experimental study, in which four open source static program analysis tools namely, FindBugs, CodePro Analytix, UCDetector, and PMD have been applied on four small Java projects to appraise the bug detection effectiveness and efficiency on mutation bugs. In this experiment, we generated multiple applicable mutants of each projects using MuJava tool and subsequently applied the four SPA tools to measure the bug detecting effectiveness and efficiency. The obtained data was analyzed on two different bug classifications, namely mutant based and severity based. Our results showed that PMD demonstrated the maximum bug detecting effectiveness as well as efficiency among the four SPA tools, whereas CodePro Analytix identified bugs at all category of severity including most of the high severity bugs.