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Record W2964175311 · doi:10.1109/tse.2018.2868349

Debugging Static Analysis

2018· article· en· W2964175311 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaUniversität PaderbornÉcole Polytechnique Fédérale de LausanneHeinz Nixdorf StiftungDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
KeywordsStatic analysisDebuggingComputer scienceDebuggerStatic program analysisProgramming languageProgram analysisAlgorithmic program debuggingSoftware bugSource codeData-flow analysisCall graphCode (set theory)TracingTaint checkingSoftware engineeringData flow diagramDatabaseSoftwareSoftware development

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Static analysis is increasingly used by companies and individual code developers to detect and fix bugs and security vulnerabilities. As programs grow more complex, the analyses have to support new code concepts, frameworks and libraries. However, static-analysis code itself is also prone to bugs. While more complex analyses are written and used in production systems every day, the cost of debugging and fixing them also increases tremendously. To understand the difficulties of debugging static analysis, we surveyed 115 static-analysis writers. From their responses, we determined the core requirements to build a debugger for static analyses, which revolve around two main issues: abstracting from both the analysis code and the code it analyses at the same time, and tracking the analysis internal state throughout both code bases. Most tools used by our survey participants lack the capabilities to address both issues. Focusing on those requirements, we introduce Visuflow, a debugging environment for static data-flow analysis. Visuflow features graph visualizations and custom breakpoints that enable users to view the state of an analysis at any time. In a user study on 20 static-analysis writers, Visuflow helped identify 25 and fix 50 percent more errors in the analysis code compared to the standard Eclipse debugging environment.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.778
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.003
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.250
Teacher spread0.237 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it