Mining Fix Patterns for FindBugs Violations

Abstract

Several static analysis tools, such as Splint or FindBugs, have been proposed to the software development community to help detect security vulnerabilities or bad programming practices. However, the adoption of these tools is hindered by their high false positive rates. If the false positive rate is too high, developers may get acclimated to violation reports from these tools, causing concrete and severe bugs being overlooked. Fortunately, some violations are actually addressed and resolved by developers. We claim that those violations that are recurrently fixed are likely to be true positives, and an automated approach can learn to repair similar unseen violations. However, there is lack of a systematic way to investigate the distributions on existing violations and fixed ones in the wild, that can provide insights into prioritizing violations for developers, and an effective way to mine code and fix patterns which can help developers easily understand the reasons of leading violations and how to fix them.