Finding bugs is easy

13 years 10 months ago

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Many techniques have been developed over the years to automatically ﬁnd bugs in software. Often, these techniques rely on formal methods and sophisticated program analysis. While these techniques are valuable, they can be diﬃcult to apply, and they aren’t always eﬀective in ﬁnding real bugs. Bug patterns are code idioms that are often errors. We have implemented automatic detectors for a variety of bug patterns found in Java programs. In this paper, we describe how we have used bug pattern detectors to ﬁnd real bugs in several real-world Java applications and libraries. We have found that the eﬀort required to implement a bug pattern detector tends to be low, and that even extremely simple detectors ﬁnd bugs in real applications. From our experience applying bug pattern detectors to real programs, we have drawn several interesting conclusions. First, we have found that even well tested code written by experts contains a surprising number of obvious bugs. Second, Java (...

David Hovemeyer, William Pugh

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