Visible to the public Just-in-time Static Analysis

TitleJust-in-time Static Analysis
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsDo, Lisa Nguyen Quang, Ali, Karim, Livshits, Benjamin, Bodden, Eric, Smith, Justin, Murphy-Hill, Emerson
Conference NameProceedings of the 26th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-5076-1
Keywordscomposability, Just-in-Time, Layered analysis, Metrics, pubcrawl, static analysis, taint analysis
AbstractWe present the concept of Just-In-Time (JIT) static analysis that interleaves code development and bug fixing in an integrated development environment. Unlike traditional batch-style analysis tools, a JIT analysis tool presents warnings to code developers over time, providing the most relevant results quickly, and computing less relevant results incrementally later. In this paper, we describe general guidelines for designing JIT analyses. We also present a general recipe for transforming static data-flow analyses to JIT analyses through a concept of layered analysis execution. We illustrate this transformation through CHEETAH, a JIT taint analysis for Android applications. Our empirical evaluation of CHEETAH on real-world applications shows that our approach returns warnings quickly enough to avoid disrupting the normal workflow of developers. This result is confirmed by our user study, in which developers fixed data leaks twice as fast when using CHEETAH compared to an equivalent batch-style analysis.
URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3092703.3092705
DOI10.1145/3092703.3092705
Citation Keydo_just–time_2017