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Cited by 397

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Finding bugs is easy

Hovemeyer, David, Pugh, William·2004·ACM SIGPLAN Notices
DOI 10.1145/1052883.1052895
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Abstract

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 serious bugs in several widely used 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 (and similar languages) have many language features and APIs which are prone to misuse. Finally, that simple automatic techniques can be effective at countering the impact of both ordinary mistakes and misunderstood language features.

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Metadata

Authors
Hovemeyer, D., & Pugh, W.
Venue
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Published
2004-12
Volume
39
Issue
12
Pages
92-106
ISSN
  • 0362-1340 (ISSN-L)
  • 1558-1160
DOI
10.1145/1052883.1052895
OpenAlex
W2087527532
Cited by
397
References
0
FWCI
29.14
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.