Do Static Source Code Analysis Tools Really Work?

jlunavtgrad writes "I recently attended an embedded engineering conference and was surprised at how many vendors were selling tools to analyze source code and scan for bugs, without ever running the code. These static software analysis tools claim they can catch NULL pointer dereferences, buffer overflow vulnerabilities, race conditions and memory leaks. Ive heard of Lint and its limitations, but it seems that this newer generation of tools could change the face of software development. Or, could this be just another trend? Has anyone in the Slashdot community used similar tools on their code? What kind of changes did the tools bring about in your testing cycle? And most importantly, did the results justify the expense?"

Comments

I second valgrind

[jberryman]

There's also valgrind, for Linux users

It's great for finding all those elusive bits of code that might be accidentally seeding a pseudo-random number generator somewhere.

Re:In Short, Yes

[neokushan]

I hope you realise I just spent a good 2mins googling around for an explanation of a for loop with 4 parts to it instead of the 3 I was used to seeing. I genuinely thought it was some special, relatively unknown and underused part of the C spec that I'd just not seen before.
Then I realised it was just the HTML screwing up a less-than symbol. Then I felt a bit silly.
Then I just had to tell someone....