Automatic mining of source code repositories to improve bug finding techniques
IEEE Transactions on Software EngineeringPublished 1 June 2005
Chadd C. Williams, Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth
Citations199
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.45
SNIP2.43
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TL;DR
A static source code checker is implemented that searches for a commonly fixed bug and uses information automatically mined from the source code repository to refine its results, identifying 178 warnings that are likely bugs in the Apache Web server source code and 546 warnings in Wine.
Abstract
We describe a method to use the source code change history of a software project to drive and help to refine the search for bugs. Based on the data retrieved from the source code repository, we implement a static source code checker that searches for a commonly fixed bug and uses information automatically mined from the source code repository to refine its results. By applying our tool, we have identified a total of 178 warnings that are likely bugs in the Apache Web server source code and a total of 546 warnings that are likely bugs in Wine, an open-source implementation of the Windows API. We show that our technique is more effective than the same static analysis that does not use historical data from the source code repository.
Keywords
Computer Science
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