Triaging Checklists : a Substitute for a PhD in Static Analysis

Static analysis tools have achieved great success in recent years in automating the process of detecting defects in software. However, these sophisticated tools have yet to gain widespread adoption, since many of these tools remain too difficult to understand and use. In previous work, we discovered that even with an effective code visualization tool, users still found it hard to determine if warnings reported by these tools were true errors or false warnings. The fundamental problem users face is to understand enough of the underlying algorithm to determine if a warning is caused by imprecision in the algorithm, a challenge that even experts with PhDs may take a while to achieve. In our current work, we propose to use triaging checklists to provide users with systematic guidance to identify false warnings by taking into account specific sources of imprecision in the particular tool. Additionally, we plan to provide checklist assistants, which is a library of simple analyses designed to aid users in answering checklist questions.