Making findbugs more powerful

Abstract

To find bugs in software, a number of automated techniques have been developed over years. In recent years the research on finding bugs are being considered with utter importance as the automated detection of bugs plays a momentous role to minimize the cost of testing software. Findbugs is a widely used bug finding tool for java that supports plug-in architecture for adding new bug detectors. We have explored the already detected bug patterns and noticed that there are a number of bug patterns that are yet not detected by findbugs. Thus, our research is a momentous step to make findbugs more reliable and effective. We have written bug detectors to detect 8 different bug patterns. Our analysis and experiments have identified 4 bug patterns that are never detectable by findbugs. We have tested our bug patterns with PMD and have found that PMD cannot detect those bug patterns that our bug detectors can detect. We have run a number of popular applications to test the effectiveness of our bug detectors and our results show that our detectors can successfully detect the bug patterns they aim for and the percentage of false positive, reported by our detector is 15.45% that is much less than the percentage of false positive reported by findbugs.