A study of static analysis for fault detection in software
Jiang Zheng, Laurie A. Williams, Nachiappan Nagappan, Will Snipes, JOHN P. HUDEPOHL, Mladen Alan Vouk · NCSU Libraries Repository (North Carolina State University Libraries) · 2005
No single software fault-detection technique is capable of addressing all fault-detection concerns.Similar to software reviews and testing, static analysis tools (or automated static analysis) can be used to remove defects prior to release of a software product.To determine to what extent automated static analysis can help in economic production of a high-quality product, we have analyzed static analysis faults and test and customer-reported failures for three large-scale industrial software systems developed at Nortel Networks.The data indicate that automated static analysis is an affordable means of software fault detection.Using the Orthogonal Defect Classification scheme, we found that automated static analysis is effective at identifying Assignment and Checking faults, allowing the later software production phases to focus on more complex, functional, and algorithmic faults.A majority of the defects found by automated static analysis appears to be produced by a few key types of programmer errors.Statistical analysis results indicate that the combination of the number of automated static analysis faults and the number of test failures can be effective to identify problem modules.Our results indicate static analysis tools are complementary to other fault-detection techniques for the economic production of a high-quality software product.