Finding more null pointer bugs, but not too many
David Hovemeyer, William White Tison Pugh · 2007
In the summer of 2006, the FindBugs project was challenged to improve the null pointer analysis in FindBugs so that we could find more null pointer bugs. In particular, we were challenged to try to do as well as a publicly available analysis by Reasoning, Inc on version 4.1.24 of Apache Tomcat. Reasoning's report is a result of running their own static analysis tool and using manual auditing to remove false positives. Reasoning reported a total of 9 null pointer warnings in Tomcat 4.1.24, of which only 2 were reported by FindBugs 1.0. While we wanted to improve the analysis in FindBugs, we wanted to retain our current low level of false positives.