Always one more bug: applying AdaWise to improve Ada code

AdaWise, a set of tools currently under development at ORA, performs automatic checks to verify the absence of common run-time errors affecting the correctness or portability of Ada programs. The tools can be applied to programs of arbitrary size, and they are conservative—that is, the absence of a warning guarantees the absence of a problem. If AdaWise issues a warning, there is a potential error that should be investigated by the programmer. AdaWise checks at compile-time for such potential errors as incorrect order dependence and erroneous execution due to improper aliasing. These errors are not detected by typical compilers. We ran two of the tools on several publicly available Ada software products to determine if the tools issue useful warnings without bombarding the user with “false positives.” We found that AdaWise generated a small number of total warnings, and that false positives usually indicated areas of weakness in the products tested.

This paper describes our preliminary tests using the AdaWise toolset, and analyzes the warnings that were issued.