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OOPSLA
2004
Springer

Finding bugs is easy

14 years 4 months ago
Finding bugs is easy
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
Added 02 Jul 2010
Updated 02 Jul 2010
Type Conference
Year 2004
Where OOPSLA
Authors David Hovemeyer, William Pugh
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