Tracking the Evolution of Static Code Warnings: the State-of-the-Art and a Better Approach

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of static code warning tracking and proposes a better approach to improve integration with development workflows, aiding in prioritization, learning fix patterns, and enhancing static analysis utility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for tracking static code warnings that supports better integration, prioritization, and downstream tasks in software engineering.

Findings

Tracking static warnings improves developer focus on recent issues.

Enhanced warning tracking supports automated repair learning.

Better tracking increases static analysis tool utilization.

Abstract

Static bug detection tools help developers detect problems in the code, including bad programming practices and potential defects. Recent efforts to integrate static bug detectors in modern software development workflows, such as in code review and continuous integration, are shown to better motivate developers to fix the reported warnings on the fly. A proper mechanism to track the evolution of the reported warnings can better support such integration. Moreover, tracking the static code warnings will benefit many downstream software engineering tasks, such as learning the fix patterns for automated program repair, and learning which warnings are of more interest, so they can be prioritized automatically. In addition, the utilization of tracking tools enables developers to concentrate on the most recent and actionable static warnings rather than being overwhelmed by the thousands of warnings from the entire project. This, in turn, enhances the utilization of static analysis tools. Hence, precisely tracking the warnings by static bug detectors is critical to improving the utilization of static bug detectors further.