VISUFLOW: A debugging environment for static analyses

Lisa Nguyen Quang Do, Stefan Krüger, Patrick Hill, Karim Ali, Eric Bodden

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Code developers in industry frequently use static analysis tools to detect and fix software defects in their code. But what about defects in the static analyses themselves? While debugging application code is a difficult, time-consuming task, debugging a static analysis is even harder. We have surveyed 115 static analysis writers to determine what makes static analysis difficult to debug, and to identify which debugging features would be desirable for static analysis. Based on this information, we have created Visijflow, a debugging environment for static data-flow analysis. Visuflow is built as an Eclipse plugin, and supports analyses written on top of the program analysis framework Soot. The different components in Visuflow provide analysis writers with visualizations of the internal computations of the analysis, and actionable debugging features to support debugging static analyses. A video demo of Visuflow is available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkEfBDwiuH4

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages89-92
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356633
DOIs
StatePublished - May 27 2018
Event40th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2018 - Gothenburg, Sweden
Duration: May 27 2018Jun 3 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
ISSN (Print)0270-5257

Conference

Conference40th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2018
Country/TerritorySweden
CityGothenburg
Period5/27/186/3/18

Keywords

  • Debugging
  • Empirical software engineering
  • IDE
  • Static analysis
  • survey
  • user study

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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