Extending static code analysis with application-specific rules by analyzing runtime execution traces

Abstract

Static analysis tools cannot detect violations of application-specific rules. They can be extended with specialized checkers that implement the verification of these rules. However, such rules are usually not documented explicitly. Moreover, the implementation of specialized checkers is a manual process that requires expertise. In this work, application-specific programming rules are automatically extracted from execution traces collected at runtime. These traces are analyzed offline to identify programming rules. Then, specialized checkers for these rules are introduced as extensions to a static analysis tool so that their violations can be checked throughout the source code. We implemented our approach for Java programs, considering 3 types of faults. We performed an evaluation with an industrial case study from the telecommunications domain. We were able to detect real faults with checkers that were generated based on the analysis of execution logs.