An Approach to Merge Results of Multiple Static Analysis Tools (Short Paper)

Abstract

Defects have been compromising quality of software and costing a lot to find and fix. Thus a number of effective tools have been built to automatically find defects by analyzing code statically. These tools apply various techniques and detect a wide range of defects, with a little overlap among defect libraries. Unfortunately, the advantages of tools' defect detection capacity are stubborn to combine, due to the unique style each tool follows when generating analysis reports. In this paper, we propose an approach to merge results from different tools and report them in a universal manner. Besides, two prioritizing policies are introduced to rank results so as to raise users' efficiency. Finally, the approach and prioritizing policies are implemented in an integrated tool by merging results from three independent analyzing tools. In this way, end users may comfortably benefit from more than one static analysis tool and thus improve software's quality.