Tracking the Evolution of Static Code Warnings: the State-of-the-Art and a Better Approach

Static bug detection tools help developers detect problems in the code, including bad programming practices and potential defects. Recent efforts to integrate static bug detectors in modern software development workflows, such as in code review and continuous integration, are shown to better motivate developers to fix the reported warnings on the fly. A proper mechanism to track the evolution of the reported warnings can better support such integration. Moreover, tracking the static code warnings will benefit many downstream software engineering tasks, such as learning the fix patterns for automated program repair, and learning which warnings are of more interest, so they can be prioritized automatically. In addition, the utilization of tracking tools enables developers to concentrate on the most recent and actionable static warnings rather than being overwhelmed by the thousands of warnings from the entire project. This, in turn, enhances the utilization of static analysis tools. Hence, precisely tracking the warnings by static bug detectors is critical to improving the utilization of static bug detectors further.