Finding patterns in static analysis alerts: improving actionable alert ranking
Quinn Hanam, Lin Tan, Reid Holmes, Patrick Lam · 2014
Static analysis (SA) tools that find bugs by inferring programmer beliefs (e.g., FindBugs) are commonplace in today's software industry. While they find a large number of actual defects, they are often plagued by high rates of alerts that a developer would not act on (unactionable alerts) because they are incorrect, do not significantly affect program execution, etc. High rates of unactionable alerts decrease the utility of static analysis tools in practice.