Static code analysis is widely used to support the development of secure software. It helps developers detect potential bugs and security vulnerabilities in a program’s source code without executing it. While the potential benefits of static analysis tools are beyond question, their usability is often criticised and prevents software developers from using static analysis to its full potential. In the past decade, researchers have studied developer needs and opposed them to available static analysis tool functionalities. In this paper, we summarize the main design challenges for building usable static analysis tools, and show that they revolve around the notion of explainability. We present existing analysis tools and current research in static analysis usability, and detail how they approach those challenges. This leads us to proposing potential lines of future work in explainability for static analysis, namely turning static analysis tools into assistants and teachers.

Marcus Nachtigall

Germany

Lisa Nguyen Quang Do

Google

Switzerland

Eric Bodden

Heinz Nixdorf Institut, Paderborn University and Fraunhofer IEM

We present an editor that creates an interactive live preview for simple quadcopter missions. The preview provides instant feedback and the imperative script can be adapted through direct manipulation of the visualization. While the program is executed to draw the preview, it traces the source locations of all values. If a value is changed in the visualization, the change can be traced back to the source to produce the desired result. An application prototype demonstrates that our approach produces sensible and generalizing results even in the presence of control flow structures in our DSL.

Thomas Witte

Ulm University

Germany

Matthias Tichy

Ulm University, Germany

This paper proposes Fulib-Scenarios as means to explain data modelling, GUI Mockups, and simple algorithms to non-IT people.

Albert Zündorf

Kassel University

Sebastian Copei

Kassel University

Ira Diethelm

Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg / University of Oldenburg

Claude Draude

Kassel University

Germany

Adrian Kunz

Kassel University

Germany

Ulrich Norbisrath

University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Austria