Transforming programs to allow Static Analysis to do better

During software development, bugs are costly and difficult to find and fix. There are many static and dynamic analyzers now available that analyze the source code to identify possible defects. For higher quality software, static analysis and dynamic analysis should be used in a complementary manner. We present a comparative study of various static analysis tools for JAVA and C and discuss the techniques used by them. We explore the concept of partitioning a program such that the partitions can be analyzed separately. With such partitioning, potentially different analysis techniques can be applied to different program partitions, with each analysis having to deal with reduced code which can increase its effectiveness. Our experiments show that partitioning can indeed increase the effectiveness of static analysis. Our initial experience in using testing data for partitioning and applying static analysis only on the complementary partition indicates that it results in detection of more errors which might have gone unnoticed otherwise. Finally we discuss the merits and demerits of using our approach on some of these tools.

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