ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE STATIC ANALYSIS TO FIND BUGS

Much research in recent years has focused on using static analysis to find bugs in software. Many new approaches employing sophisticated program analysis techniques—inter-procedural, context-sensitive, or path-sensitive—have been devel-oped. However, comparatively little work has been done on determining what bugs can be found using simple analysis techniques. We have found that simple static analysis techniques are effective at finding hundreds or thousands of serious software defects in several large commercial software applications. In our research, we have attempted to characterize the bugs that can be found in production software using simple analysis techniques. Examples of simple analysis techniques include inspection of class hierarchies and method signatures, sequential scanning of program instructions using a state machine recognizer, intra-procedural dataflow analysis, and flow-insensitive whole program analysis. To determine what bugs may be found using these techniques, we performed bug-driven research. Start-ing from examples of real bugs, we tried to develop simple analysis techniques to find similar bugs. Using this approach, we found a large number of serious bugs in pro