A Comparison of Bug Finding Tools for Java
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A Comparison of Bug Finding Tools for Java - Bugs in software are costly and difficult to find and fix. In recent years, many tools and techniques have been developed for automatically finding bugs by analyzing source code or intermediate code statically (at compile time). Different tools and techniques have different tradeoffs, but the practical impact of these tradeoffs is not well understood. In this paper, we apply five bug finding tools, specifically Bandera, ESC/Java 2, FindBugs, JLint, and PMD, to a variety of Java programs. By using a variety of tools, we are able to cross-check their bug reports and warnings. Our experimental results show that none of the tools strictly subsumes another, and indeed the tools often find non-overlapping bugs. We discuss the techniques each of the tools is based on, and we suggest how particular techniques affect the output of the tools. Finally, we propose a meta-tool that combines the output of the tools together, looking for particular lines of code, methods, and classes that many tools warn about.
In recent years, many tools have been developed for automatically finding bugs in program source code, using techniques such as syntactic pattern matching, data flow analysis, type systems, model checking, and theorem proving. Many of these tools check for the same kinds of programming mistakes, yet to date there has been little direct comparison between them. In this paper, we perform one of the first broad comparisons of several Java bug-finding tools over a wide variety of tasks.
In the course of our experiments, we discovered, somewhat surprisingly, that there is clearly no single “best” bugfinding tool. Indeed, we found a wide range in the kinds of bugs found by different tools (Section 2). Even in the cases when different tools purport to find the same kind of bug, we found that in fact they often report different instances of the bug in different places (Section 4.1). We also found that many tools produce a large volume of warnings, which makes it hard to know which to look at first. Download free A Comparison of Bug Finding Tools for Java.pdf here
In recent years, many tools have been developed for automatically finding bugs in program source code, using techniques such as syntactic pattern matching, data flow analysis, type systems, model checking, and theorem proving. Many of these tools check for the same kinds of programming mistakes, yet to date there has been little direct comparison between them. In this paper, we perform one of the first broad comparisons of several Java bug-finding tools over a wide variety of tasks.
In the course of our experiments, we discovered, somewhat surprisingly, that there is clearly no single “best” bugfinding tool. Indeed, we found a wide range in the kinds of bugs found by different tools (Section 2). Even in the cases when different tools purport to find the same kind of bug, we found that in fact they often report different instances of the bug in different places (Section 4.1). We also found that many tools produce a large volume of warnings, which makes it hard to know which to look at first. Download free A Comparison of Bug Finding Tools for Java.pdf here
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