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Finding Bugs Is Easy

Posted by timothy on from the roll-the-log-over dept.

daveho writes "My advisor and I are working on a tool to automatically find bugs in Java programs. One of the interesting results of our work is that we've found hundreds of real bugs in production code using extremely simple techniques. We believe that automated tools, if used more widely, could prevent a lot of bugs from making it in to production systems."

2 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Re:...and? by michaelggreer · · Score: 4, Informative

    Javac and Jikes will tell you where it can't compile. This is higher level stuff like "such-and-such should be final" and "you have implemented equals but not hashcode." Code will run, and probably run fine, with these, but they may lead to subtle bugs difficult to track down. Compile-time or formatting bugs are easy to find. Bugs that express themselves in non-obvious ways are what we need more tools for.

    In answer to another post, of course good design and good coding are best. This tool does not seek to replace thought, but push us towards proper coding

  2. Been there, done that by Tal+Cohen · · Score: 4, Informative

    While working in IBM Research, we were developing a tool to do just that; I do believe it was significantly richer than this one. The first versions were aimed specifically at J2EE, and searched for really 'high-level' bugs -- anything from bad patterns to violations of the J2EE spec. The initial results of this effort are already included in WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.0, as part of the Verifiers. More powerful versions will appear in future releases of WSAD.

    --
    - Tal Cohen