Debugging Static Analysis

Static analysis is increasingly used by companies and individual code developers to detect bugs and security vulnerabilities. As programs grow more complex, the analyses have to support new code concepts, frameworks and libraries. However, static-analysis code itself is also prone to bugs. While more complex analyses are written and used in production systems every day, the cost of debugging and fixing them also increases tremendously.

VisuFlow (https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04894) is a debugging environment for static analysis. It contains debugging features specialized for debugging static, data-flow analyses that were obtained from a large-scale survey on 115 static analysis writers. In a user study on 20 static-analysis writers, VISUFLOW helped identify 25% and fix 50% more errors in the analysis code compared to the standard Eclipse debugging environment.

This dataset contains the survey questions, user study questionnaire, anonymized survey answers and anonymized user study observations.