March 1, 2008
Paul Anderson in Embedded Technology
Embedded Technology today published an article by GrammaTech's Paul Anderson titled "Static vs. Dynamic Detection of Bugs in Safety-Critical Code". An excerpt appears below, with a link to the full article.
Static vs. Dynamic Detection of Bugs in Safety-Critical Code
Paul Anderson, VP of Engineering, GrammaTech
In the never-ending quest to produce high-quality software, traditional dynamic testing plays a fundamental role. The weakness of dynamic testing is that it is only as good as the test cases. To be effective, a great deal of effort must go into writing or generating good test cases, and doing so can be very expensive.
Recently, a new breed of static analysis tools has emerged that can find flaws without writing any test cases. These tools, which are also referred to as static testing tools, can find bugs that are difficult or impossible to find using standard testing methodologies. They can locate serious flaws such as buffer overruns, null pointer dereferences, resource leaks, and race conditions. Because they operate by analyzing the source code itself in detail, they can also highlight inconsistencies or contradictions in the code such as unreachable code, useless assignments, and redundant conditions. Such issues often indicate programmer confusion, and correlate well with bugs. Moreover, knowledge of these issues can actually make writing test cases easier.
About Grammatech
GrammaTech's static-analysis tools are used worldwide by startups,
Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, and government
agencies. The staff includes ten researchers with PhDs in programming
languages and program analysis. The company has offices in Ithaca, New
York, and San Jose, California. More information about GrammaTech can
be found at www.grammatech.com.
GrammaTech, Inc.
317 N. Aurora St.
Ithaca, NY 14850 USA
phone: 607-273-7340
fax: 607-273-8752
e-mail: info@grammatech.com