More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Repositioning of static analysis alarms

Authors:

Rohith Talluri,

Alexander SerebrenikAuthors Info & Claims

ISSTA 2018: Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Pages 187 - 197

https://doi.org/10.1145/3213846.3213850

Published: 12 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The large number of alarms reported by static analysis tools is often recognized as one of the major obstacles to industrial adoption of such tools.

We present repositioning of alarms, a novel automatic postprocessing technique intended to reduce the number of reported alarms without affecting the errors uncovered by them. The reduction in the number of alarms is achieved by moving groups of related alarms along the control flow to a program point where they can be replaced by a single alarm. In the repositioning technique, as the locations of repositioned alarms are different than locations of the errors uncovered by them, we also maintain traceability links between a repositioned alarm and its corresponding original alarm(s). The presented technique is tool-agnostic and orthogonal to many other techniques available for postprocessing alarms.

To evaluate the technique, we applied it as a postprocessing step to alarms generated for 4 verification properties on 16 open source and 4 industry applications. The results indicate that the alarms repositioning technique reduces the alarms count by up to 20% over the state-of-the-art alarms grouping techniques with a median reduction of 7.25%.

References

[1]

{n. d.}. Polyspace Code Prover. http://in.mathworks.com/products/ polyspacecodeprover/. {Online: accessed 30-Jan-2017}.

[2]

Frances E. Allen. 1970. Control Flow Analysis. In Symposium on Compiler Optimization. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1–19.

Digital Library

[3]

Nathaniel Ayewah and William Pugh. 2010.

[4]

The Google FindBugs Fixit. In International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 241–252.

Digital Library

[5]

Nathaniel Ayewah, William Pugh, J. David Morgenthaler, John Penix, and YuQian Zhou. 2007. Evaluating Static Analysis Defect Warnings on Production Software. In Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1–8.

Digital Library

[6]

Moritz Beller, Radjino Bholanath, Shane McIntosh, and Andy Zaidman. 2016.

[7]

Analyzing the State of Static Analysis: A Large-Scale Evaluation in Open Source Software. In International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering, Vol. 1. 470–481. Repositioning of Static Analysis Alarms ISSTA’18, July 16–21, 2018, Amsterdam, Netherlands

[8]

Al Bessey, Ken Block, Ben Chelf, Andy Chou, Bryan Fulton, Seth Hallem, Charles Henri-Gros, Asya Kamsky, Scott McPeak, and Dawson Engler. 2010.

[9]

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World. Commun. ACM 53, 2 (2010), 66–75.

Digital Library

[10]

Maria Christakis and Christian Bird. 2016. What Developers Want and Need from Program Analysis: An Empirical Study. In International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 332–343. 1145/2970276.2970347

Digital Library

[11]

Patrick Cousot, Radhia Cousot, Manuel Fähndrich, and Francesco Logozzo. 2013.

[12]

Automatic Inference of Necessary Preconditions. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 128–148.

[13]

Pascal Cuoq, Florent Kirchner, Nikolai Kosmatov, Virgile Prevosto, Julien Signoles, and Boris Yakobowski. 2012. Frama-c. In International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods. Springer, 233–247.

[14]

Ankush Das, Shuvendu K. Lahiri, Akash Lal, and Yi Li. 2015.

[15]

Angelic Verification: Precise Verification Modulo Unknowns. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 324–342.

[16]

Vinicius Rafael Lobo de Mendonca, Cassio Leonardo Rodrigues, Fabrízzio Alphonsus A de M. N. Soares, and Auri Marcelo Rizzo Vincenzi. 2013. Static analysis techniques and tools: A systematic mapping study. In International Conference on Software Engineering Advances.

[17]

Isil Dillig, Thomas Dillig, and Alex Aiken. 2012.

[18]

Automated Error Diagnosis Using Abductive Inference. In Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 181–192. 2254064.2254087

Digital Library

[19]

Marcel Gehrke. 2014.

[20]

Bidirectional Predicate Propagation in Frama-C and its Application to Warning Removal. Master’s thesis. Hamburg University of Technology.

[21]

Sarah Heckman and Laurie Williams. 2011. A Systematic Literature Review of Actionable Alert Identification Techniques for Automated Static Code Analysis. Inf. Softw. Technol. 53, 4 (2011), 363–387. 007

Digital Library

[22]

David Hovemeyer and William Pugh. 2004. Finding Bugs is Easy. SIGPLAN Not. 39, 12 (2004), 92–106.

Digital Library

[23]

Brittany Johnson, Yoonki Song, Emerson Murphy-Hill, and Robert Bowdidge. 2013. Why Don’t Software Developers Use Static Analysis Tools to Find Bugs?. In International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 672–681.

Digital Library

[24]

Uday Khedker, Amitabha Sanyal, and Bageshri Sathe. 2009.

[25]

Data flow analysis: theory and practice. CRC Press.

Digital Library

[26]

Yit Phang Khoo, Jeffrey S. Foster, Michael Hicks, and Vibha Sazawal. 2008. Path Projection for User-centered Static Analysis Tools. In Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 57–63.

Digital Library

[27]

Lucas Layman, Laurie Williams, and Robert St. Amant. 2007. Toward Reducing Fault Fix Time: Understanding Developer Behavior for the Design of Automated Fault Detection Tools. In International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. 176–185.

Digital Library

[28]

Woosuk Lee, Wonchan Lee, and Kwangkeun Yi. 2012.

[29]

Sound Non-statistical Clustering of Static Analysis Alarms. In International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 299–314. 3- 642- 27940- 9_20

Digital Library

[30]

Ravi Mangal, Xin Zhang, Aditya V. Nori, and Mayur Naik. 2015. A User-guided Approach to Program Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2015). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 462–473.

Digital Library

[31]

Bertrand Meyer. 2002.

[32]

Design by contract. Prentice Hall.

[33]

Tukaram Muske. 2014. Improving Review of Clustered-Code Analysis Warnings. In International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 569–572. 2014.97

Digital Library

[34]

Tukaram Muske, Ankit Baid, and Tushar Sanas. 2013. Review efforts reduction by partitioning of static analysis warnings. In International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation. 106–115. SCAM.2013.6648191

[35]

Tukaram Muske and Uday P. Khedker. 2016.

[36]

Cause Points Analysis for Effective Handling of Alarms. In International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering. 173–184.

[37]

Tukaram Muske and Alexander Serebrenik. 2016.

[38]

Survey of approaches for handling static analysis alarms. In International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation. 157–166.

[39]

Flemming Nielson, Hanne R. Nielson, and Chris Hankin. 1999.

[40]

Principles of Program Analysis. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, USA.

Digital Library

[41]

Caitlin Sadowski, Jeffrey van Gogh, Ciera Jaspan, Emma Söderberg, and Collin Winter. 2015. Tricorder: Building a Program Analysis Ecosystem. In International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 598–608.

Digital Library

[42]

YN Srikant and Priti Shankar. 2007.

[43]

The compiler design handbook: optimizations and machine code generation. CRC Press.

Digital Library

[44]

Arnaud Venet. 2008. A Practical Approach to Formal Software Verification by Static Analysis. Ada Lett. XXVIII, 1 (2008), 92–95. 1387830.1387836

Digital Library

[45]

Dalin Zhang, Dahai Jin, Yunzhan Gong, and Hailong Zhang. 2013. Diagnosis-Oriented Alarm Correlations. In Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, Vol. 1. 172–179.

Digital Library

[46]

Jiang Zheng, Laurie Williams, Nachiappan Nagappan, Will Snipes, John P. Hudepohl, and Mladen A. Vouk. 2006.

Cited By

Gigante DPecorelli FBarletta VJanes ALenarduzzi VTaibi DBaldassarre M(2023)Resolving Security Issues via Quality-Oriented Refactoring: A User Study2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt)10.1109/TechDebt59074.2023.00016(82-91)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TechDebt59074.2023.00016
Guo ZTan TLiu SLiu XLai WYang YLi YChen LDong WZhou Y(2023)Mitigating False Positive Static Analysis Warnings: Progress, Challenges, and OpportunitiesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.332966749:12(5154-5188)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3329667
Pathade KKhedker U(2023)Computing Maximum Fixed Point Solutions over Feasible Paths in Data Flow AnalysesScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2023.102944(102944)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2023.102944
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Repositioning of static analysis alarms
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Formal software verification
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program reasoning
      1. Program analysis

Recommendations

Detecting false alarms from automatic static analysis tools: how far are we?
ICSE '22: Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering

Automatic static analysis tools (ASATs), such as Findbugs, have a high false alarm rate. The large number of false alarms produced poses a barrier to adoption. Researchers have proposed the use of machine learning to prune false alarms and present only ...
Sound Non-Statistical Clustering of Static Analysis Alarms

We present a sound method for clustering alarms from static analyzers. Our method clusters alarms by discovering sound dependencies between them such that if the dominant alarms of a cluster turns out to be false, all the other alarms in the same cluster ...
Survey of Approaches for Postprocessing of Static Analysis Alarms
Static analysis tools have showcased their importance and usefulness in automated detection of defects. However, the tools are known to generate a large number of alarms which are warning messages to the user. The large number of alarms and cost incurred ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISSTA 2018: Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 2018

379 pages

ISBN:9781450356992

DOI:10.1145/3213846

General Chair:
Frank Tip
Northeastern University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Eric Bodden
University of Paderborn, Germany / Fraunhofer IEM, Germany

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

In-Cooperation

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 July 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Badges

Artifacts Evaluated & Functional

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ISSTA '18

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ISSTA '18: International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 16 - 21, 2018

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 58 of 213 submissions, 27%

Upcoming Conference

ISSTA '25

Sponsor:
sigsoft

34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

June 25 - 28, 2025

Trondheim , Norway

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

15
Total Citations
View Citations
333
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)28
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 20 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Gigante DPecorelli FBarletta VJanes ALenarduzzi VTaibi DBaldassarre M(2023)Resolving Security Issues via Quality-Oriented Refactoring: A User Study2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt)10.1109/TechDebt59074.2023.00016(82-91)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TechDebt59074.2023.00016
Guo ZTan TLiu SLiu XLai WYang YLi YChen LDong WZhou Y(2023)Mitigating False Positive Static Analysis Warnings: Progress, Challenges, and OpportunitiesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.332966749:12(5154-5188)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3329667
Pathade KKhedker U(2023)Computing Maximum Fixed Point Solutions over Feasible Paths in Data Flow AnalysesScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2023.102944(102944)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2023.102944
Lenarduzzi VPecorelli FSaarimaki NLujan SPalomba F(2023)A critical comparison on six static analysis tools: Detection, agreement, and precisionJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2022.111575198(111575)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2022.111575
Lipp SBanescu SPretschner ARyu SSmaragdakis Y(2022)An empirical study on the effectiveness of static C code analyzers for vulnerability detectionProceedings of the 31st ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3533767.3534380(544-555)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3533767.3534380
Mansoor NMuske TSerebrenik ASharif B(2022)An Empirical Assessment on Merging and Repositioning of Static Analysis Alarms2022 IEEE 22nd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM55253.2022.00031(219-229)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCAM55253.2022.00031
Muske TSerebrenik A(2022)Classification and Ranking of Delta Static Analysis Alarms2022 IEEE 22nd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM55253.2022.00029(197-207)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCAM55253.2022.00029
Mansoor N(2021)Empirical Assessment of Program Comprehension Styles in Programming Language Paradigms2021 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC51201.2021.9576333(1-2)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC51201.2021.9576333
Yuksel USozer H(2021)Dynamic Filtering and Prioritization of Static Code Analysis Alerts2021 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW)10.1109/ISSREW53611.2021.00086(294-295)Online publication date: Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSREW53611.2021.00086
Khaled LAbdelbaki N(2020)Evaluation of Software Static AnalyzersProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Software and Information Engineering10.1145/3436829.3436835(11-17)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3436829.3436835
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents