Supporting Software Inspection with Static Profiling

Static software checking tools are useful as an additional automated software inspection step that can easily be integrated in the development cycle and assist in creating secure, reliable and high quality code. However, an often quoted disadvantage of these tools is that they generate an inordinate number of warnings, including many false positives due to the use of approximate analysis techniques. This information overload effectively limits their usefulness. In this paper we present ELAN, a technique that helps the user prioritize the information generated by a software inspection tool, based on a demand-driven computation of the likelihood that execution reaches the locations for which warnings are reported. This analysis is orthogonal to other prioritization techniques known from literature, such as severity levels and statistical filtering to reduce false positives. We evaluate the feasibility of our technique using a number of case studies and assess the quality of our static estimates by comparing them to actual values obtained by dynamic profiling.