Sorald: Automatic Patch Suggestions for SonarQube Static Analysis Violations

• Published in: IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing 2023-07, Vol.20 (4), p.2794-2810
• Main Authors: Etemadi, Khashayar, Harrand, Nicolas, Larsen, Simon, Adzemovic, Haris, Phu, Henry Luong, Verma, Ashutosh, Madeiral, Fernanda, Wikstrom, Douglas, Monperrus, Martin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analyzers; automatic program repair; Automatic programs; Code; Codes; Codes (symbols); Computer bugs; Computer software; Cost analysis; Flaw detection; Java; Java programming language; Maintenance engineering; Meta Programming; metaprogramming; Program debugging; Repair; Software design; Software development management; Static analysis; Static analyzers; Static code analysis; Static codes; Syntactics; Trees (mathematics); Violations
• ISSN: 1545-5971; 1941-0018; 1941-0018
• DOI: 10.1109/TDSC.2022.3167316

Previous work has shown that early resolution of issues detected by static code analyzers can prevent major costs later on. However, developers often ignore such issues for two main reasons. First, many issues should be interpreted to determine if they correspond to actual flaws in the program. Second, static analyzers often do not present the issues in a way that is actionable. To address these problems, we present Sorald : a novel system that uses metaprogramming templates to transform the abstract syntax trees of programs and suggests fixes for static analysis warnings. Thus, the burden on the developer is reduced from interpreting and fixing static issues, to inspecting and approving full fledged solutions. Sorald automatically fixes violations of 10 rules of SonarQube , a single Java static analyzer that is among the mostly used. We evaluate Sorald on a dataset of 161 popular repositories on Github . Our analysis shows the effectiveness of Sorald as it fixes 65% (852/1,307) of the violations that meets the repair preconditions. Overall, our experiments show it is possible to automatically fix notable violations of the static analysis rules produced by the state-of-the-art static analyzer SonarQube .