Survey on static program analysis results refinement approaches

In the present day, software development industry for different classes of computing devices grows at an extremely high speed. Continuously growing power of computational systems presents new opportunities to create powerful, often parallel, programs and software systems. This leads to the growth of complexity of software intended to manage these computational systems. The process of quality assurance calls for new approaches and methods both to check correctness and satisfiability of requirements for software as well as for check software for critical runtime defects and security vulnerabilities. Program analysis is one of the methods intended to assure software quality. The static and dynamic analysis tool industry has been evolving aggressively since the first decade of 2000th. Nowadays there are many academic research and industrial tools for program analysis. But, due to fundamental limitations and engineering compromises for the sake of performance and scalability, static analysis tools cannot avoid false positive alarms. At the same time, reviewing static analysis tool alarms can take significant time of an experienced software engineer or a software quality assurance specialist. Hence, the task of automating refinement of static analysis tool results becomes more important. This survey covers approaches for static analysis tools result refinement. Approaches, which combine static and dynamic analysis of programs form the principal concern of this paper.