Get started imminently: Using tutorials to accelerate learning in automated static analysis

Jan Peter Ostberg, Stefan Wagner

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Static analysis can be a valuable quality assurance technique as it can find problems by analysing the source code of a system without executing it. Getting used to a static analysis tool, however, can easily take several hours or even days. In particular, understanding the warnings issued by the tool and rooting out the false positives is time consuming. This lowers the benefits of static analysis and demotivates developers in using it. Games solve this problem by offering a tutorial. Those tutorials are integrated in the setting of the game and teach the basic mechanics of the game. Often it is possible to repeat or pick topics of interest. We transfer this pattern to static analysis lowering the initial barrier of using it as well as getting an understanding of software quality spread out to more people. In this paper we propose a research strategy starting with a piloting period in which we will gather information about the questions static analysis users have as well as hone our answers to these questions. These results will be integrated into the prototype. We will evaluate our work then by comparing the fix times of user using the original tool versus our tool.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2012 Imperial College Computing Student Workshop, ICCSW 2012
Pages109-115
Number of pages7
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event2nd Imperial College Computing Student Workshop, ICCSW 2012 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 27 Sep 201228 Sep 2012

Publication series

Name2012 Imperial College Computing Student Workshop, ICCSW 2012
Volume28

Conference

Conference2nd Imperial College Computing Student Workshop, ICCSW 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period27/09/1228/09/12

Keywords

  • Empirical research
  • Gamification
  • Motivation
  • Static analysis
  • Usability

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