StaticTracker: A Diff Tool for Static Code Warnings

Static bug detectors help improve software quality by detecting code issues (e.g., code smells or bugs). However, static bug detectors are underutilized in practice due to various reasons. One primary reason is that static bug detectors often report an overwhelming number of static warnings for one software revision. To facilitate better adoption of static bug detectors in software development, we propose a tool, namely StaticTracker, that specializes in tracking the evolution of static code warnings. StaticTracker analyzes each commit and produces the changes of static code warnings caused by the commit, i.e., a diff for static code warnings. We integrate StaticTracker in continuous integration through Git Hooks. Whenever developers push code to a git repository, StaticTracker is automatically activated to identify disappeared and newly-introduced warnings by the commit. We implement StaticTracker for two static bug detectors (Spotbugs and PMD) and evaluate StaticTracker on the recent commits of two open-source projects (Druid and Jedis). Our evaluation shows that StaticTracker is effective in reducing the overwhelming static code warnings that developers need to investigate and achieves an accuracy of 89.8%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art tracking approach with an accuracy of 68.5%. We open source the tool at https://github.com/ljj430/tracking-static-warnings tool demo, and the demo video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WMOjoq1Nbs.